Saints and Sinners: What’s wrong with marriages
As if marriage in the United States doesn’t present enough problems, along comes the highest court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to rule that same-sex marriages are legal.
Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-3 in November that same-sex couples had a right under the state constitution to the benefits of marriage. Last week it ruled by the same margin that only marriage — not civil union — would satisfy its initial decision. Is another sacred tradition of family life headed for the trash heap?
Was it already well on its way?
We hear all sorts of reasons why so many of today’s marriages fall apart. One is that our expectations for marriage — of “happily ever after” — are too high. We have somehow gotten it into our heads that if we are not tingling most of the time, we must be unhappy, needlessly suffering in a loveless marriage.
The late C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don who was for many the intelligent man’s guide to religion, blamed the failure of marriage on the “being in love” myth. People get the idea, he said, that if they have married the right person they may expect to go on “being in love” forever. As a result, when they find out that the “first fine careless rapture” of being in love is no longer there, they think this proves they made a mistake and are entitled to a change.
Put another way, as Sheri Tepper has, we have grown up on “the myth of happy.”
Tepper, in a book called “So Your Happily Ever After Isn’t” (Grandview College Press, 1977), explained that most of us put our lives into two categories — the “highs” and the “blahs.” If we aren’t having enough highs, Tepper says, we feel we must be having the blahs. So we go through life “chasing the highs.”
But, she reminds us, a high is being joyous or ecstatic — a once-in-a-while condition. And what Lewis and Tepper both say we ought to be striving for in a relationship is “comfortable” — normal-in-the-middleness in which there will be occasional highs and lows.
“If you have a comfort relationship which is warm and nourishing, and if you care enough not to be lazy about it, you can,” Tepper says, “have something better than high.”
“Being in love” is a good thing, but it is not the best thing, Lewis explained. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life together. It is a noble feeling but it is nonetheless a feeling “and no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity — or even to last at all,” he said.
So let us remember “comfortable.”
On the other hand, there is such a thing as taking all the romance out of marriage by being too reasonable and too realistic. Unless there is a little of the storybook, fairytale quality about marriage, it will lack the imagination every successful enterprise needs.
Even Lewis, who made a distinction between “being in love” and loving — “a deep unity maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit” — also recognized the kickstarting role that “being in love” plays:
“It is this other, quieter love which enables them to keep the promise,” Lewis said. “It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run. Being in love was merely the explosion that started the engine.”
Perhaps we all need to play “let’s pretend” with marriage.
Pretense, which takes the place of the real thing, is bad. But pretense, which LEADS to the real thing, is good. If we go into marriage acting as if we are going to live happily ever after — and nourish that bit of “let’s pretend” as the years go on — we may find that the fairy tale comes true.
George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.