Marriage is on the decline, they say. According to Pew Research Center, 39% of respondents believe marriage is obselete and 1 in 4 of today’s young adults may never marry based on current trends.
“Getting married huh,” was the response of my senior PhD student when he heard about my August vacation plans, “so you’re actually going to try it.”
It was just the light chit-chat we always engaged in during the wait for the bus that was to take us back to Montreal.
His dry comment made me smile to myself.
“Why, what do you think about marriage?” I asked, curious to know his thoughts.
“Oh, to me it’s just a piece of paper, why bother,” he stated wryly before turning his gaze back on to the empty country road.
I do see his point – if marriage is only a piece of paper or spending a ton of money on a couple of short hours in your life, it is no wonder marriage is on the decline and everyone would prefer to simply move in together then go through all that hassle.
So, why did we get married?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself in these fledgling newlywed days, and jotting down snippets of thought in unfinished notes to myself (one of those notes is titled “freedom, marriage, life’s purpose”).
The day we got legally married, I remember holding my husband’s (then fiance’s) hand walking down the concrete pavement in the blazing Denver sun.
There was a grey scanner we walked through to enter the city court office, where a kind elderly lady handed us an oversized piece of paper with “Marriage License” in old style calligraphy across the top.
What a beautiful bride you are, she exclaimed dearly, when I lowered my mask so she could see my face for identity verification.
We brought the license to Southside Pizzeria that night (for visa application purposes, we had to sign the papers before the ceremony) where we were to meet our officiant and his wife.
I got myself a glass of cheap house red wine; my husband ordered an IPA beer.
And in a tall pizzeria booth with red leather cushions, we got legally married over slices of hot, cheesy pizza, making sure we noted the toppings down for future recreation, henceforth to be known as our anniversary pizza.
“I can’t believe you can just say you want to get married, walk into the court office, sign a piece of oversized paper and be married,” I said to him later in the car.
This piece of paper couldn’t be it, I thought, but I’ll feel married when I’m up there at the altar saying my vows. It’ll hit me then.
And don’t get me wrong, the wedding itself was a dream. I mean, I got to hold a chicken in my arms and walk around barefoot in a bohemian lace dress that picked up twigs and brush as it swept across the grass, while being with my favourite people in the whole world.
Yet, standing up there at the altar, which is supposed to be the most magical moment of your life, all I could think about was the sound the white fabric on the cross was making flapping in the wind and how lipstick made bringing my lips together in any non-smiling fashion incredibly challenging.
If anything, I was more struck with how limited my person was at being able to take it all in.
I knew intellectually that people had travelled across the country to be here with us.
I knew I was making a serious weighty commitment that would change the course of my life.
I knew this was the day I had been imagining in all of its glory and beauty from my days as a young, dreamy girl.
That I should be ecstatic, and to be sure, there was a level of joyous bubbliness that comes from being at an awesome party.
Yet part of me also knew I couldn’t hold on to these moments forever and in a few hours, my favourite people would once again disperse to their corner of the world.
I knew I couldn’t say hi to everyone at the wedding because time didn’t allow for it.
I knew that as joyous a celebration as it was, it also marked the shift of an era – changes to relationships and rhythms as I had come to know them.
As Tim Keller says in his book, “Making Sense of God,”
“as time goes on, you realize the irretrievability of it all, a constant kind of death in the midst of life.”
As the wedding has come and gone, and we are finally starting to feel somewhat settled after the 4000 mile cross-country roadtrip that characterized the first few days of our young married life, I have been reflecting on what it means to be married beyond the piece of paper or the beautiful blur of our wedding.
I have many thoughts – many that swirl in my head and some that I am putting down on paper now lest they disappear into oblivion –
but thus far, the best ways I have come to think about marriage is in the ways it is making me more human.
While we can easily fool ourselves to believe we can make things whatever we want it to, marriage reminds me there is an order that has preceded me.
That in fact beauty requires structure and limitation.
Like how we do not decide which colors watercolors form when mixed in certain ratios, but within the limitation of the rules of color mixing, we create beauty. (see below my attempt to discover the rules of watercolor mixing)
In the same way, marriage is not a free-form contract that we have made up the arbitrary rules to (which in that case would carry no meaning and why would anyone want to bind themselves to that sort of contract).
Rather, it is a covenant ordained by God with boundaries that we operate within.
While we can easily fool ourselves (as single people with free evenings) that our energy is boundless and we can commit ourselves to an infinite number of tasks, marriage has been reminding me to stop my work at night to have dinner with my husband.
It is also a reminder that I cannot commit myself to an infinite number of people as in the case of dating apps which give you the illusion of having multiple “deep” relationships without ever having to sell out for one.
Rather, marriage is saying no to everyone else to be with one.
In a society where optionality is idolized and Princeton graduates do consulting because it is the high-earning career option that doesn’t force you down any one career path (the world is your oyster, as they say), marriage is cutting out my options.
It is teaching me that you can either give yourself fully to a reality or you don’t at all because you are living in so many other alternate ones.
Marriage is a reminder that I can’t be savior to everyone.
I have had to disappoint people in not spending the time with them as I used to before marriage.
I grieved the loss of not being able to be there for everyone I loved whenever they needed me but marriage is teaching me that I am but one person with limited time and energy.
It is trusting that those people trust me and my heart enough to know I love them even when it may look different for a season.
Being married means I constantly live with the reality that I disappoint people I love; it’s part of being human.
Just this past Tuesday, I came home from lab exhausted from equipment not working the way it should. And in attempting to wrestle my sourdough pizza into the 525 oven so dinner could be ready within a slim 30 min window, set off our condo’s sensitive fire alarm and after the chaos had died down, left my husband 10 minutes to wolf down his pizza before his night class.
While we can easily fool ourselves to think we know everything and control our own worlds, marriage is entering into the uncertainty and mystery of two humans with two unpredictable wills joining together.
It is entering into a lack of control because no longer do we merely belong to ourselves but to each other.
It is a giving into something greater than ourselves, a trusting that we do not hold ourselves up but there is a God who does.
Only by His grace can I enter into a covenant of commitment, knowing it is not just my own willpower that keeps me faithful to it (for how scary that would be, knowing how flimsy my willpower is in the face of chocolate souffle).
And how freeing it is to submit to a form and order not dreamt up by me but that has pre-dated me for millennia, for it reminds me of how small of a human I am and how little control I really have of the world.
Marriage is making me more human.
I came across a Wendell Berry essay written in 1982 titled “On Poetry and Marriage” that compares the two as analogous forms of beauty within limitation and perhaps better summarizes what I am struggling to describe :
Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death.
It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, anymore than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel.
Poetry of the traditionally formed sort, for instance, does not propose that it’s difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose.
Marriage does not invite one to solve one’s quarrel with one’s wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed- imposed before the beginning…
In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form not entirely of its own making . When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of a creaturely life . We live only one life, and die only one death.
A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short.
A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short…
[Marriage] must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown.
We must not be misled by the procedures of experimental thought:
in life, in the world, we are never given two known results to choose between,
but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is.
– Wendell Berry, On Poetry and Marriage
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Wow, I love this, Viv. Thanks for sharing your thoughts so vividly and vulnerably, as always. A great reminder to focus on God as we understand our human limitations, and also the idea that limitation can be beautiful and good. Love you <3