America has become tragically ignorant about something we once seemed to understand:
marriage.
Even in the Church, we postpone marriage later and later, as if it were a particularly unpleasant
dental appointment. There's so much to do first -- we have to "find out who we are." We have
to get our careers established. We have to prove we're successful.
I had a taste of that myself when I got married back in 1977. I had sold my first novel and
wanted to get it finished and delivered ... before I got married. So I was just a few minutes late
getting to the temple because I had to finish xeroxing that manuscript and get it into the mail.
What was I thinking? That it would somehow be better if my wife knew for sure that she was
not part of my career as a writer?
That's such a silly mistake -- that we must or even can "find ourselves" before we've made that
lifelong (or longer) commitment.
Here's why it's a mistake: We don't ever "find" ourselves. Instead, in marriage, we make
ourselves.
No, we make each other -- as a joint project. We turn ourselves into a perfect fit. Our self is
the marriage, and our part in it. There is no "I" without the "we."
In the March 2008 Atlantic Monthly, Lori Gottlieb, a never-married woman who chose to have a
child without ever meeting the donor, writes a plaintive lament called "Marry Him!" (See
Http://TheAtlantic.com.)
The article is worth reading in its entirety. But to sum it up, Gottlieb makes it plain that while
she doesn't regret having her beloved child, she wishes she had done it the right way -- as part
of a marriage, with a partner.
She talks about the advantages of marriage -- even if you don't have a lot of romantic feelings
for your partner. After all, she points out, you don't spend that much time together anyway, once
you're married. Instead, you have a division of labor. Ideally, one earns the living while the
other does the child care and maintenance of the house and home.
And yet, even if you aren't often together, there's somebody who shares your goals and your
problems, somebody to rely on, somebody to hear you out. You're not alone.
She remembers, with regret, all the almost-good-enough men she refused to "settle for" because
they didn't measure up to some romantically idealized list.
Too bad she hadn't heard President Spencer W. Kimball's remarks on the subject back in 1976:
"'Soul mates' are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will
seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible
and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have
happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price."
(http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6136)
Romance is nice. But it is biological in origin. That dizzy head-over-heels feeling is a species of
losing your mind, and most of the time it lasts only as long as the chase.
What we keep forgetting is that in marriage, as opposed to romances, you aren't marrying the
thrilling wonderful perfect Someone you're looking at right now.
You're marrying the man who decides not to have the dazzling career with the high salary,
refusing promotions and transfers so the kids don't have to change schools. You're marrying the
woman whose body doesn't bounce back after the third baby, so she's no longer slim and
attractive by the standards of the magazines.
You're marrying the migraines and the hemorrhoids and the heart attack and the cancer; you're
marrying the irritable forgetful lazy thoughtless sarcastic distracted too-busy days as well as the
Kodak-happy ones.
You're marrying the one who works with you to raise the retarded or crippled child, or stands
with you at the graveside of the child who dies.
You're marrying the one who can't find work after the company folds or he's laid off; you're
marrying the early alzheimer's, the diabetes, the obesity, the pain of conflict and the struggle of
forgiveness.
The foundation of that isn't some ideal of romantic love. It's a commitment based on the goals
you share. And real love, married love, is not what you start with -- it's what you create
together along the way.
How foolish, when our young people wait to find love, or to have God show them their
foreordained mate, instead of rationally looking at the eligible people and choosing someone
who can and will live up to the commitment of marriage, someone with shared faith, someone
with whom you can establish friendship and affection.
All marriages are between strangers. And sometimes it's the boring man who'll make the best
husband, the plain woman who'll make the best mother.
It takes time to come to know the other person; it take time for each of you to become someone
new and different and perfectly adapted to the other. You'll be there through the whole process,
though, because your commitment is stronger than the bands of death.
But as that knowledge grows, so does the real love, the deep love. Compared to the thick strong
fabric of married love, romantic love is a kleenex. You can't make anything out of it. It's
disposable -- there's always another in the box.
All the things you think you have to do before you get married are a waste of precious time.
Start the marriage, then do the other things for and with each other.
None of your plans will work out exactly as you hoped; but the partnership of a good man and a
good woman who are "willing to pay the price" will outlast all such plans.
My wife and I are only thirty years into this journey, so we're still working it out. But I
imagined the end of the mortal portion of the trip, and wrote this:
Well Paired Team
By Orson Scott Card
You don't arrive at marriage, lonely hearts.
The wedding's where the lifelong journey starts,
Forced to travel with a clumsy fool
Or trot along behind a receding dream
(You had to stop and help me when I tripped,
While you would never stick to my passionate script),
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender's Game, Ender's
Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and
younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools.
Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary
fantasy (Magic Street,Enchantment,Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables,Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker
(beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and
scripts.
Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and
Utah. He served a mission for the LDS Church in Brazil in the early 1970s.
Besides his writing, he teaches occasional classes and workshops and directs
plays. He also teaches writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.
Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife,
Kristine Allen Card, and their youngest child, Zina Margaret.