Marriage is the joining of two lives, the mystical, physical, and emotional union of two human beings who have separate families and histories, separate tragedies and destinies. It is the merging and intermeshing not only of two bodies and two personalities, but also of two life stories. Two individuals, each of whom has a unique and life-shaping past, willingly choose to set aside the solitary exploration of themselves to discover who they are in the presence of one another.
In marriage we marry a mystery, an other, a counterpart. In a sense the person we marry is a stranger about whom we have a magnificent hunch. The person we choose to marry is someone we love, but his depths, her intimate intricacies; we will come to know only in the long unraveling of time. We know enough about our beloved to know that we love him, to imagine that, as time goes on, we will come to enjoy her even more, become even more of ourselves in her presence. To our knowledge we add our willingness to embark on the journey of getting to know him, of coming to see her, ever so wonderfully more.
Swept up by attraction, attention, fantasy, hope, and a certain happy measure of recognition, we agree to come together for the mysterious future, to see where the journey will take us. This companionship on life’s journey is the hallmark of marriage, its natural province, and its sweetest and most primal gift. To be married means we belong with someone else, that we are no longer always alone, that we no longer must eat and sleep, dream, wake, walk, talk, think, and live alone. Instead there is a parallel presence and spirit in all that we undertake. We are bridled, connected, attended. We move in the midst of the aura, the welcoming soul-filling presence of another human being, no longer facing the troubling, heart-rending hurts of our lives in isolation. In marriage we are delivered from our most ancient aloneness, embraced in the nest of human company, so that the sharp teeth of the truth that we are born and die alone are blunted by the miracle of loving companionship.
Marriage is also the incubator of love, the protected environment in which a love that is personal and touching and real can grow and, as a consequence of that growth, develop in us our highest capabilities as loving human beings. We are each still and always becoming, and when we marry, we promise not only our own becoming but also our willingness to witness and withstand the ongoing becoming of another human being. That is because in marrying we promise to love not only as we feel right now, but also as we intend to feel. In marriage we say not only, “I love you today,” but also, “I promise to love you tomorrow, the next day, and always.”
In promising always, we promise each other time. We promise to exercise our love, to stretch it large enough to embrace the unforeseen realities of the future. We promise to learn to love beyond the level of our instincts and inclinations, to love in foul weather as well as good, in hard times as well as when we are exhilarated by the pleasures of romance.
We change because of these promises. We shape ourselves according to them; we live in their midst and live differently because of them. We feel protected because of them. We try some things and resist trying others because, having promised, we feel secure. Marriage, the bond, makes us free-to see, to be, to love. Our souls are protected; our hearts have come home.
In simple terms this means that because we are safe in marriage, we can risk; because we have been promised a future, we can take extraordinary chances. Because we know we are loved, we can step beyond our fears; because we have been chosen, we can transcend our insecurities. We can make mistakes, knowing we will not be cast out; take missteps, knowing someone will be there to catch us. And because mistakes and missteps are the stuff of change, of expansion, in marriage we can expand to our fullest capacity; in marriage we can heal.
Because life is movement, the passage of time equals change.
Therefore, when we promise time to one another, we are putting ourselves in the midst of an infinity of change. Implicitly this is also a promise to expand. We will not be cardboard men and women. We will be electric human beings with variegated histories and fabulous unknown futures.
For marriage is more than just the sentimental formalizing of a feeling; it is a vote of confidence, indeed of conviction, that the romantic feeling of love will be enlarged to encompass far more than itself, that both persons will be able, in time, and within the sacred circle of marriage, to infinitely expand.
Change compounded is transformation; and therefore one of the ultimate consequences of marriage is transformation. For so long as we live out our lives in the context of another human being, the changes that accrue in us, that are indeed inspired, required, cajoled, and beaten out of us by our interactions with another-all these will result, in time, in a major transformation of our selves. We would become someone quite different without the person we have married, for it is the alchemy of the relationship itself that transforms us. That which we become in the presence of another person-the person we love most deeply, the person we choose to marry and spend our whole life with, the person in whose presence and as a result of whose actions and inactions, words and silences causes us to change, ultimately to transform-brings us inescapably into the being of our highest selves. We become who we were meant to be.
It is precisely at the point at which marriage, the institution, and love, the emotion, intersect that there exist some of our greatest emotional and spiritual possibilities. For marriage is love in the round; marriage is loving in every direction. We marry not only to be loved, to be consoled through the miracle of company, to feel secure, to have a place and a person to whom we can come home, to have our own needs met; we marry also to come into the presence of our own capacity to love: to nurture, to heal, to give, and to forgive.
Marriage is the fearless fathoming of our own depths, a coming face-to-face, in the dark mercurial waters of our endless self-involvement, with the jewel-like treasures of our own submerged capacities for compassion. For love received is needs met; but love delivered is compassion, is the human spirit altered, is our own most whole becoming. In loving we are encouraged to the limits of our most exquisite human possibilities.
Thus marriage is an invitation to transcend the human condition.
For in stepping beyond the self-focus of wanting to have only our own needs met, in schooling ourselves in the experience of putting another human being and his or her needs in a position of equal value to our own, we touch the web of transcendence, the presence of the divine.
For loving one another is the beginning of compassion, and compassion generalized is participation in the divine-that experience of life and of the world that paradoxically submerges us in all that exists while at the same time elevating us above it. The compassionate, soul-changing loving of a single other human being connects us most profoundly to the All. And it is in the practice of this radiant other-discovering love that true marriage calls forth the best in us, the most we can ever become.
