Love And Marriage

PARTNERS AND MARRIAGE
By Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

"I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom
met a man who didn't fear marriage. Something about the closure seems
constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for
what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within
our lives.

When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a
mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social
acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was
the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners
became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I
looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each
other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering and
could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed
to glow in each other's presence. They seemed really in love, not just
dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other's foibles. It was
an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible.

How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness,
so much irritation at the other's habits? What keeps love alive in
them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less
love each other?

The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to
the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad
relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to
succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a
good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see
clearly in the early stages.

Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see
yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things
by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a
way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination. Some
people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most
heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the
other side. This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded
hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to
know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see
clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so
large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what
life would be like together.

The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long- time
friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get
to know each other's laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see
each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together
before they get swept into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell
of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for
other keys to compatibility.

One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy
each other's company over the long term. If your laughter together is
good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a
healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise.
If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other.
And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the
world around you new. Beware of a relationship in which there is no
laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on
seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common
serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do
not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based
on being critical together.

After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way
you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see
their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of
them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming
power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As
the relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important
again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you
can't accept, you will inevitably come to grief. Look at the way she
cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that
makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be
careful. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world
around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live
on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart
resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery
of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only
to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance
doesn't become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling
isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all
have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and
private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you
fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of
you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves
growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you
share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart
lives and dreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging
of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter
and unsatisfied with their mates.

So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a
partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage
can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak
of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word. There is a
miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is
one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower.
The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love
becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around
us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know
them they would be impossible to believe. Marriage is a transformation
we choose to make.

Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We
cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a
bloom will come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom
will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the
bloom will be flawed. We are quite willing to accept the reality of
negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation
that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared
when I was younger.

It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed
love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the
possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into
something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than
the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of
this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with
something lesser and bitter. But there is positive transformation as
well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion
of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is
growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two
separate beings, two separate presence, two separate consciousnesses
come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They
remain separate, but they also become one.

There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction,
as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and
there are not traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of
life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each
choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken
somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the
richness that it alone contains.

But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by
the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one.
Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of
shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage
commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more
complex. So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it
for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it
the power of transformation.

If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you
are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the
endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen,
if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons
that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the
miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of a
marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a
thousand flowers will bloom... endlessly."