The Secret to Marriage

The late Erma Bombeck wrote in one of her many columns, “Marriage is what happens after you get out of bed.”  Now, I am all for romance and love, but after being married over forty years, all be it, to two different women, I think marriage has less to do with being in love than being committed to working at marriage.  In the Bible, one of the first commands from God is to get married.  The text asserts, “It is not good for man to be alone.” 

Let’s try and be honest.  People who are married can certainly be loving, considerate and caring. Many times they are just so. But they can also be exasperating, annoying, uncaring, thoughtless, mean, and selfish.  Such is the nature of the human being.  We are inconsistent, ambiguous, unreliable and complicated.  And we don’t always listen well. 

Love can be a deep, passionate soul to soul feeling;  marriage is an adventure.  The goal of marriage is to work and play at making the marriage work.  Easy to say and hard to do.  Marriage is not for the faint of heart.  The person you marry will change and change and then change back.  It can be wonderfully passionate and terribly difficult.  There are moments when you feel exhausted and have reached your limits.  You keep on anyway.

And, sad to say, sometimes you do need to stop. Sometimes you have done everything that you can do and  the marriage is over. It is sad but necessary.  I never thought I would get there.  I always thought that I would keep on anyway, that I was tenacious, that I was determined to make it work, that I could and would fix what was wrong. But I could not do it and it shocked me more that I can tell you.  For years I refused to admit it.  Divorce was very sad and akin to dying.  It was also the end of a chapter and the freedom and sanity to try again.

I love marriage.  I married again.  We love and care for each other.  More importantly, we are diligently working at it.  But our marriage does not depend on whether we love each other.  It depends on whether we are working at caring about each other.  It requires intentional listening, doing, and a new thing.  I have realized that it is not my job to fix everything that is wrong.  It is our job to work at it and to learn to live with and for each other in the midst of all our quirks, eccentricities, imperfections and flaws.  By the way, that is real love.

If you are thinking of getting married, ask yourself, not if you are in love, but can you work with this person when they are not lovely; are you willing to work on being married?  Marriage has less to do with being in love than being mindful that you are married, delicately caring for the marriage after you get out of bed, and enjoying the crazy, rigorous, fascinating adventure of caring so much for another person that their soulful health is your greatest concern.  Go for it and enjoy!