As For Me and My House: Crafting Your Marriage to Last

by Walter Wangerin Jr.

So, when does a marriage begin? Not when two people fall in love with one another. Love (though it may be an overwhelming inducement, finally, to marry) does not make a marriage. At that point each may feel an intense commitment to the other, but that commitment is not independent of feelings. Rather, it's founded on nothing but feelings— and feelings are as unstable as water, while marriage is the establishment of stability itself in a relationship. Feelings come and go. Marriage is meant to endure in spite of them.

Listen: marriage begins when two people make the clear, unqualified promise to be faithful, each to the other, until the end of their days.

It is one's total commitment unto another. It is

It is one's timeless commitment unto another. Time does not affect the contract.

We approach the wedding with fear, and it isn't just stage fright that weakens our knees. No, some come to the speaking and the hearing of this covenant plain afraid. Why is that? Is it right or common? Most common. And perhaps it can't be helped. Look again at the two characteristics that make this contract unique—total commitment, timeless commitment—and realize that they occur within a world which is sinful and time-bound. The environment of the vow makes the vow seem hazardous after all.

Faith. This is no Christian whimsy, the proper, holy, and expected thing to say. This is a critical necessity, that we have faith in the God who loves the both of us, who encourages such a relationship as marriage, and who is above time. It is only in God that we do touch the future after all, even if we cannot know it, for God embraces in his own knowing the present and the future together: he who is here with us now, as we begin the relationship, is also, now, at every anniversary of that relationship until we die.

Forgiveness. This is the single most significant tool we have for meeting and for healing the troubles which marriage shall surely breed between us. What those troubles will be, we do not know. But that they will be, we may be assured. And nothing— neither our love, our effective communication with each other, our talents, our money, nor all the good will in the world—no, nothing can make right again the wrongs as can forgiveness.

Let's admit over our coffee that getting married, as good as it may be for those who choose it, is nonetheless a crisis in the lives of newlyweds because it requires radical changes in their habits and behavior, in their assessment of their worlds and themselves, in their priorities, and in their responsibilities. Marriage is an unacknowledged cataclysm to lifestyles.

Marriage immediately forces changes upon the partners, which, no matter how well prepared they thought they were, surprise them and require a new and specialized labor from both of them. This is the fact: the woman does not know who her husband is until he is her husband, nor the man his wife until she exists as wife. Before the marriage these people were fiances, not spouses; fiances and spouses are different creatures, and the second creature doesn't appear until the first has passed away. Did the courtship last many, many years? It doesn't matter. Were they friends long before they initiated courtship? It doesn't matter. They still can't know the spouse until he or she is a spouse; and there isn't a spouse until there is a marriage.

Even if the partners have lived together before the marriage contract and think they know each other very well, it still doesn't matter. They will change when they marry. Permanence changes behavior, and marriage makes the experimental relationship permanent. No—no amount of foresight avails, since we simply cannot see what is not.

(1) Idealization!realization. Our idealized image of the fiance will (must) be replaced by a true realization of the spouse who is; good work, here, will lead us to an acceptance of our spouse, while poor work may lead to alienation. (2) Mutualization. The willing and easy part-time mutuality which we maintained during courtship will (must) become a real, realistic, and lasting mutualization of our whole lives, spirits, attitudes, and priorities to each other, so that we do not merely act, but truly are, one. Good work here will be an honest and deep character adjustment, person to person; poor work may lead to disengagement. (3) Gender differences. The common, natural differences between the men and women of our culture, often invisible during courtship, become clearly apparent in marriage. Good work will (must) celebrate and make use of these differences. But poor work results from one's disappointment over the differences. If either partner tries to change what cannot be changed in the other, that is poor work; and poor work leads to discontentment in all areas of the marriage.

There are three rooms of the marital house wherein the idealized image comes off like a dress or a cummerbund: in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and in the bedroom. The real spouse steps forth; and though she is the same, lo, she is not the same exactly.

There will almost certainly be a period of strain and of searching in the bedroom of the newly married couple (whether sex is new for the partners or not), because successful sexuality expects both a complete intimacy with the other and a complete fulfillment for the self—and it takes awhile to find out how these two (often opposed) goals can be accomplished. Besides, sexual behavior is unique to each couple. Each couple must learn its own best method; and couples learn that by trial and error.

When the realization comes, instead of withdrawing in anxiety or blame, praise the Lord and call it opportunity, for now you know the stuff with which this marriage will be made. Understand (this is critical) that you both are experiencing the selfsame disillusionment. You are in fact not separate from each other at this moment (though you may feel both separated and deceived); but, having the truth clearly between you now, you are the closer together. Moreover, you are enabled to be partners involved in the same work. This, too, is important. You are now, more than ever, each “a help perfectly fit” for the other, fellow laborers building the same house, of the same materials—but with different skills. Realization is the discovery of the differences between you, differences at first distressing. But if you see yourselves as partners and not as hostile strangers, you can both acknowledge and celebrate these differences. You can, according to your differing capacities, divide the work of the household, assigning certain duties to certain skills.

Temporary lifestyles, like springs pulled out of shape, snap back to the truer and more enduring lifestyles. “Playing” ceases in the serious business of survival. Now each partner has become the other's atmosphere, the spirit and air in which the other dwells, and both are made painfully aware of their different, previously unconscious, life patterns. They marry, and what each “minds” creeps into the conversation. In fact, they were not one:

Now, finally, the real facts and the deeper habits are clear: there is much that had never become mutual between them after all. The schedules they compulsively follow, their priorities, their instinctive value systems, the unconscious design of their days, their ways, and their space—the styles of their lives—do not yet harmonize. They entered marriage playing different tunes in different keys. And unless they rise above the noisy discord, they may feel cheated, or criticized by the differences, or imprisoned by their partner's unacceptable patterns. They may try to settle the differences by open argument, or by bossing their spouses, or by nagging. They may harden, proudly, bitterly, into the differences. They may move toward disengagement.

The fourth definition, then. This asks that you think in a new way. Up till now we have assumed that there are only two beings in a marriage, the husband and the wife. In fact, there are three complete beings in a marriage—you, your spouse, and the relationship between you, which both of you serve, which benefits each of you, but which is not exactly like either one of you.

This is the real work of mutuality. This brings your various lifestyles into harmony (without canceling either one, without a forced similitude): that you have realized a common purpose together; that you are both committed to the nurturing, not of oneself and not of one's partner, but of this third being, the Relationship; and that together you seek the wisest ways to do so— and you do them.

If they work together for the sake of this third being, they can adjust without complaint: no one is whining; no one is grasping; no one is losing something unreasonably, or being oppressed. Both apply their separate skills, and each respects the judgment and the offering of the other.

The issues are no longer personal. As both see it that way (not as accusations, but as problems to be solved), both may apply their creative minds to the common questions.