Reflections on 25 years of marriage
Twenty five years of marriage to Mary-Anne. It’s taken a long time to grow together, to do things now that once we once couldn’t. But I suppose it will seem like the usual self-promotion of the age for me to blog about it.
Of course I’ll talk up the day soon enough. First The Descendants at Dendy Opera Quays, then to Picasso’s private collection, topping it off with the Quay Restaurant’s eight-course dinner. What a vantage point to watch the cruise ship Volendam leave Sydney Harbour. What a city for a wedding anniversary.
There’s been some great reactions today. ‘You get less for murder,’ quipped Polly at Ginelli’s, our now-favourite coffee shop at 67 King Street Newtown. She, Tony and Yvette were really kind to us over breakfast and threw in many freebies.
Earlier that morning, Mary-Anne had told a woman at the pool. ‘I don’t suppose you still love him?’ was the mournful, ambivalent response. ‘I do!’ Mary-Anne responded vigorously. We’ve had other such responses, a bit haunted, yearning, disbelieving. It’s as if people want what we have, but aren’t sure if they could ever have it or are willing to do the restraint it entails. Or maybe they suspect we’re just pretending, and actually hate each other behind some facade.
It was an odd day to see The Descendants (spoiler warning) where George Clooney’s character Matt King is finding the truth about his comatose wife Elizabeth. Initially I was irritated by yet another portrayal of marriage as a stultifying, dysfunctional trap, with the inevitable slide into unfaithfulness and divorce. Marriage has become the Hollywood staple to depict joyless pain and misery. Every script-writer must take to it with a wrecking-ball, as if it can never work.
But this view has dramatic traction because so many have lived it. The wearisome succession of women in Picasso’s life, neatly threaded through the NSW Art Gallery display, bore colourful surrealist testimony to a common story. Many people know marital suffering. The gloss is off it, hence the wistful responses we received.
So I’m not going to brag about this day as if ‘we’ve worked hard for it’, or as if we have some ‘special’ kind of love. Those stories don’t fit. I feel like this day has arrived only because we’ve been the beneficiaries of a story bigger than ourselves. As my friend Brian Brock puts it, marriage provides ‘a fleeting but sharply focussed glimpse of the vast scope of the problem of human reconciliation’ (Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, 181). Anyone married knows days of grinding difficulty as we come to terms with a brute fact: the other is not some extension of myself and my whims. Marriage ‘trains Christians to recognize how the bodily nature of other creatures can confront us’ (Brock, 326). We learn there, usually the hard way, that other people actually do matter. To use the term Jesus makes me take more seriously, my wife is my first neighbour.
People say of marriage that it is boring; when what they mean is that it terrifies them: too many and too deep are its searing revelations, its angers, its rages, its hates, and its loves. They say of marriage that it is deadening, when what they mean is that it drives us beyond adolescent fantasies and romantic dreams. … Being married and having children has impressed on my mind certain lessons, and most of what I am forced to learn about myself is not pleasant. The quantity of sheer impenetrable selfishness in the human breast (in my breast) is a never-failing source of wonderment. I do not want to be disturbed, challenged, troubled. Huge regions of myself belong only to me. Seeing myself through the unblinking eyes of an intelligent, honest spouse is humiliating. (Michael Novak, The Family Out of Favor)
Scriptwriters keep picking at the hard parts of marriage because fingering this scab has become a cultural habit. But I think people don’t know ‘the reconciliation marriage depends upon for its endurance, and which neither spouse can manufacture out of his or her natural endowments’ (Brock, 181). To be married requires news about how to repent, and how to forgive.
Thankfully, The Descendants dived well beyond cliché into the complexity of marriage when Clooney beautiful portrays Matt’s farewell to his dying wife. ‘Goodbye Elizabeth. Goodbye my love, my friend, my pain, my joy.’ Even this terribly flawed marriage may have been worth it.
This day, we’ve received people’s gladness and sadness. I wish I could have said more about the way of reconciliation we learnt from Jesus Christ. It’s why I’m not bragging today.
For more on marriage, check out Joined-up Life (the book), ch. 37.
No comments this time thanks.
