/karen/

That blessed arrangement …

Wednesday, 04 March, 2009

Marriage: I keep thinking it ought to have a manual. And then I keep thinking how impractical and impossible that would be. Still, the thought goes 'round and 'round in my head, surfacing every so often as the various bits and pieces currently occupying my consciousness bond and twist together to form threads outlining what I've really been thinking.

I've just finished the Twilight series (and the temptation is to regurgitate more word vomit, but I think I'll spare you. For now). Let me reveal something slightly spoiler-ish: Edward proposes to Bella. It's not a big deal and you were probably expecting it anyway, but what interests me is Bella's reaction: she's so typically child-of-divorce because, initially, the whole idea freaks her out. She loathes it. She'd rather do anything but (which is sort of ironic because spending forever with Edward is what she wants). But you have to remember she's never seen a working marriage, and she, like the rest of Generation Ex, could probably be forgiven for being wary of something so unfamiliar.

Hence the marriage manual. Gordon (and I think I'm allowed to say this) has been working on a marriage course. If I were to guess what sort of marriage course Gordon would come up with, I would say that it would contain a lot of Bible stuff—Genesis 1, 2 and 3, Matthew 19, Ephesians 5, 1 Peter 3, 1 Corinthians 7 ... maybe even Revelation, etc.—that is, the theology of marriage—marriage being an earthly reflection of the union between Christ and his church, with an earthly purpose of procreating—filling the earth and subduing it, etc. I would even guess that it would contain some of the practical stuff about how to be married—the great material that Keith Condie covers in his article in Briefing #348 about learning to love one another in communicating, connecting on a deep emotional level, taking the time to maintain the relationship, learning from the wisdom of those who have studied marriage, etc. It's funny; I have the head knowledge of all of that (even if I'm not always very good at putting it into practice)—I've consumed things like Michael Hill's The How and Why of Love, Larry Crabb's The Marriage Builder (err, well, most of it), the section on marriage in Guidance and the Voice of God, Phillip Jensen's Love, Sex and Marriage talks and even The Five Love Language—and yet the thing that helped me most in my understanding of marriage is still Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee's The Good Marriage.

Why am I talking about this? I guess I keep thinking of Bella and people like her—people who don't understand marriage, who have never seen good marriages at work, and who don't really grasp what they're in for when they exchange vows and rings, and make massive and scary promises to one another. I suppose, in one sense, one cannot really know what one is in for when one is making those massive and scary promises; if you did, you'd certainly think twice about making them (and not all of us have the benefit of Xander's visit from his future self in Buffy Season 6!)

But what I'm thinking of is the difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge—understanding the theory and putting it into practice. Knowing the theology of marriage and all the good stuff about communication and compromise helped me to a point; where it fell down is where I just didn't understand what marriage looked like. Sure, it's supposed to look like Ephesians 5:25-31—

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

—that's the ideal. But that's just it: that's the ideal—Christ and the church. We don't always live up to the ideal. We hardly ever live up to the ideal. What does it look like for sinful human beings, joined in this thing called marriage? What does it mean from day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year? What is this thing we call cleaving from and cleaving to?

I feel as though the thing I'm talking to is rather nebulous, so I should probably explain a bit more why The Good Marriage is helpful. I already did in that blog post but let me reiterate in point form. It was a helpful book because

• It wasn't trying to tell me what to do in my marriage; it was attempting to describe for me what marriage was like. Wallerstein identified four very loose types of marriage—
  1. The romantic marriage: This is the kind of relationship that Bella and Edward have—the kind where you can't keep your hands off each other. This is the sort of relationship we're told by the media and the world is the ultimate thing because it's about passion and fireworks and mindblowing sex.
  2. The rescue marriage: This is the kind of relationship where knights in shining armour feature. Often it works both ways: the wife rescues the husband from something just as much as the husband rescues her. Often the rescue is from a troubled background or childhood. Husband and wife are survivors; they forge a new team on the ruins of their old lives.
  3. The companionate marriage: This is a very modern sort of marriage where equality and fairness and treating each other with respect are highly valued. Husband and wife are equal partners, determine to share things like the running of the household, the raising of children and the earning of the finances equally.
  4. The traditional marriage: In contrast to the companionate marriage, this is a configuration found more often throughout history: the man is head of his house and plays the role of supporting and providing for it, whereas the woman looks after the domain of the day-to-day running of the household and the raising of their children. Her role in this area helps her husband. Indeed, they complement each other.
  As I said, they were very “loose” types of marriage; not every marriage is going to fit nicely into one or another. There will be overlaps. Personally, I found the categories helpful because they showed me that there are a number of different ways to be married. It should have been obvious, but we all have different personalities, and therefore our marriages are all going to look slightly different, and how we maintain the partnership called marriage will be worked out in different ways, depending on who we are. The four types resist the notion that there is any such thing as the “perfect” or “ideal” marriage—the idea that Your Marriage Must Be Like This Otherwise You're Obviously Doing Something Wrong. That, I think, helps to remove a lot of the guilt and anxiety!
• It showed me the experiences of real couples—their joys, their sorrows, their struggles, their successes, and so on. The book came out of a two-year study of 50 Californian couples who had been married for nine years or longer. Wallerstein deliberately set the criteria of her sample to nine years because, from her research into divorce, she knew that most couples who divorced did so in the early years of their marriage. If you make it to nine, obviously you're not out of danger because couples divorce at any time; it's just the majority do it while their marriage is still young. (And thus I experienced a twinge of smugness when Ben and I crossed the ninth anniversary mark earlier this year. Yes, just a twinge!)
• It identified the tasks that couples need to fulfill in order to have successful marriages. As I've said before, the first two are very biblical. The rest are interesting too. The tasks are:

  • To separate emotionally from the family of one's childhood so as to invest fully in the marriage and, at the same time, to redefine the lines of connection with both families of origin.
  • To build togetherness by creating intimacy that supports it while carving out each partner's autonomy. These issues are central throughout the marriage but loom especially large at the outset at midlife, and at retirement.
  • To embrace the daunting roles of parents and to absorb the impact of Her Majesty the Baby's dramatic entrance. A the same time the couple must work to protect their own privacy.
  • To confront and master the inevitable crises of life, maintaining the strength of the bond in the face of adversity.
  • To create a safe haven for the expression of differences, anger and conflict.
  • To establish a rich and pleasurable sexual relationship and protect it from the incursions of the workplace and family obligations.
  • To use laughter and humor to keep things in perspective and to avoid boredom by sharing fun, interests, and friends.
  • To provide nurturance and comfort to each other, satisfying each partner's needs for dependency and offering continuing encouragement and support.
  • To keep alive the early romantic, idealized images of falling in love while facing the sober realities of the changes wrought by time.

  Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, The Good Marriage, Warner, New York, 1995, pp. 27-28.

  Whereas most books about marriage would simply state those tasks and be done with it, the thing that helpful about this book is that the experiences of the couples in the study helped to illustrate each task and why each task was important. So I understood Task 1 when Matt's mother told Sara she was totally wrong for him, and she left the house crying, called Matt and he, after deliberating for a bit (because his mother was hugely influential in his life), took a stand and sided with his future wife against his mother. I also understood Task 2 when Matt became depressed with his work but worried about quitting, however Sara was supportive and encouraged him to start his own business. Their example helped me to understand what marriage looked like. Sure, it wouldn't look the same for me, but the principles were there, and now that I had “seen” what it meant for them, I could imitate them in the context of my own marriage.
• It looked gave me a picture of what marriage is like over time—from being newlyweds to having children, to dealing with teenagers (and the resulting tension it brings; think of Maureen Easterbrook), to mid-life crises, to retirement. At each stage of your life, you are confronted with new challenges and obstacles. Your marriage adapts and adjusts to each of them just as they can make or break your marriage.

So I thought about a manual. I don't really know what a manual would look like. It wouldn't quite be the same as The Good Marriage and I'd definitely want the theological and communication stuff in there. (Somewhere. Maybe in a different form to how such things are conventionally expressed.) I guess I'm saying it needs some pictures—some stories and examples of people who have already travelled down that road and survived, their marriages as strong as ever. People like Bella need to see there's nothing to fear—nothing to loathe; marriage is beautiful, even as it's hard and challenging and crazy and whatever other adjectives you want to throw in there. Even so, it is alien—compared to singleness, that is. As Al Hsu says in The Single Issue, we are all born single, and singleness is our natural state; marriage, in a lot of ways, is profoundly unnatural in that it involves two people acting as one (or trying to). That's bizarre. If I may, let me suggest it's a faint echo of the Trinity (I say this remembering Michael Hill's college interview question to me: “What is the relationship between God and your marriage?”). I think the bizarreness is why we need a picture to help us grasp it. Talking about the theory and spouting imperatives (i.e. dos and don'ts) isn't enough.

Actually (the thought belatedly occurs to me—duh), that's probably why Paul talks about Jesus in Ephesians 5, isn't it: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church”. Christ's sacrifice is the picture. It's the extreme picture; the principle behind the thing is what Paul is aiming at (i.e. make your wife and her needs your priority, not yourself and your needs). The picture helps us to know what to do.

This is why we need more—more pictures to help us know what to do. It's easier to imitate someone than to be told what to do. Paul Grimmond's been talking about this lately as we think about the future of The Briefing and I think he's right. We need people to show us the way—a “cloud of witnesses” like Hebrews 11-12 who have lived the life of faith (some even dying for it). They say marriage is sacred ground—private space between a man and a woman. I hope we can be a little more open about that—just enough (but not too much) so that we can be honest with one another about this crazy thing called marriage, how it works in our lives and what it means to us.

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