As most of you know, this St. Patrick’s Day, Nick and I got engaged. That, in and of itself, includes a fairly hilarious story that almost had me following in the footsteps of Queen Victoria, who asked Prince Albert to marry her (I suppose no one can really presume to ask a queen to marry him, so I told myself). In ignorance of my plans, however, Nick popped the question just hours before I would have delivered my carefully planned proposal. That’s what I call perfect timing.
Getting hitched has been mostly a wonderful experience. I highly recommend it. Yet it dawned on me the other day, that there were some somber realities mixed in with the happiness and joy. Namely, marriage is probably above all else, a promise to fight every impulse to put yourself first. Of course this shouldn’t mean years of selfless devotion where one practices the art of martyrdom. The “not putting yourself first” can’t be so easily subsumed within the equally egoistic impulse to “put another first.” As all our pop-psychology books have been explaining for decades, “putting another first” is really just a way to bind another to us, which is still a symptom of the “me” syndrome–it’s called co-dependency. Rather, promising love, loyalty, and respect within the confines of marriage requires measuring your reactions and impulses according to the rhythms and demands of your relationship. Relationship: as in a relation between two or more people.
Over the years, I’ve been uneasy with the idea of marriage. I was in love and dated someone for years who was adamantly “ideologically” opposed to marriage as a bourgeois institution. There are many good arguments to support this proposition, as I recreate the discussion, two points come to mind (they must have been the most persuasive to me): 1) married people stunt their growth by keeping themselves within another’s shadow and by promising to a set of conditions they may eventually outgrow; 2) marriage is politically regressive because a married couple suffocates the communal impulses within the much restrained dyad. In other words, couples assume they have no larger responsibilities than the marriage, and it becomes an excuse to exit out of the politically charged communal world. After the break-up I became suspicious about the sincerity of the ideological claims. Now, I think there’s a lot of truth to the critique, but that it’s a limited way of understanding the radical potentials that have made marriage something a number of intelligent, politically committed people have chosen to do (I use the word political here as that which relates to the larger social world).
One of the events that helped reshape my attitudes about the institution of marriage was the wedding of my best friend. She asked me to read something at her nuptial celebrations and it got me thinking. I’ve included the contents of the speech below while thinking again about what being engaged means within the larger question of engagement. After all, it seems to me that learning to not put yourself first (otherwise generally known as “becoming an adult”) does not begin and end with a marriage. Marriage according to this line of thought, then, could become something very different from a retreat from the world. It could become its opposite: an engagement with the fundamental nature of relation itself, which is nothing short of the way we live and share this world with others. Of course, as with everything, it’s up to the participants to transform potential into reality.
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Melissa and Drew have asked me to say a few words on the occasion of their marriage. I won’t pretend to have wise words of advice on how marriage is done. I suspect, anyway, that each and every marriage is a singular creation – that whatever rules there are, are made as you go. But since Melissa and Drew have asked me to speak here today, I’ve had the opportunity to think a little about the institution of marriage and the event of the wedding. And I’d like to share these thoughts with you.
An honest appraisal of marriage would suggest that it’s an institution better left abandoned. The political history is one of inequality and exploitation – a transfer of property from one social group to the next. And its modern expression doesn’t seem to be much better. Everyday we hear of abandonment and betrayal, or co-dependency and a desperate desire to be anything but alone.
So in a world of choices, in the midst of this institutional mess, why marriage? Why now? I would like to offer that the answer lies precisely in the question of choice. We’re a people used to getting out of responsibility: why should I pay taxes, why should I work harder than the slacker next door, why should I bother recycling? We’re the same way about the bigger things, too. We’re full of excuses: well, my childhood was really messed up; or, I don’t even know those people; and the most used of all, I’m just one person what could I possibly do? Add to this a world of exponentially increasing options and we have a situation where we can move freely from town to town, from one person to the next, without ever having to be hampered by the constricting desires or needs of any other person. When a situation is no longer ideal or easy there are a thousand ways to move on. But what is it that gets lost amidst this never ending pursuit for a life without restriction? What gets lost is the responsibility of choosing.
To choose is to make a stand. To choose is to cut through the fears and fantasies that actually keep us from fulfilling our deepest longings. Marriage as choice is to become accountable to another – to choose a life of accountability. Accountability is, after all, the central condition of living, for this is a world we share with others. Indeed life is itself that sharing, that being exposed. In choosing to radically share their lives with each other, Melissa and Drew accept the fundamental challenge of our times. It is the act of accepting this challenge we witness here today, and it is this acceptance – which love teaches us – that all our hopes for tomorrow are built upon.
A wedding isn’t the singular expression of that choice – that happens everyday for the rest of their lives together. It is, however, the constitutive expression of that choice. The wedding sets the terms and the tone – that’s why it’s so sad when we go to boring, formulaic weddings. But a wedding that seeks to challenge the strictures of the institution enacts a rescue mission, to save everything that is beautiful and true and freeing about two people who want to spend the rest of their lives loving and choosing each other.
A wedding is also a gift. A gift, not only for the two people entering into marriage, but for the community that gathers around the event. The wedding brings together a group of family, friends, and strangers, and thus the gift is that gathering. Yet the wedding is another kind of gift, or rather, the gift of wedding as community is a gathering and a calling. This wedding comes to us as a call, a cry coming out of the night, addressing each of us by name, moving us to action and engagement with the world. Today we are here to celebrate the coming together of two choices, but we are also being asked whether we, ourselves, have created lives of accountability. We are being reminded that the highest form of love takes place as a decision to share our lives with others, and this happens both between individuals and as a community, in the giving and receiving without measure.
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