The Five People I Married

Let me begin by letting you know that I’ve been married to the same woman for most of my life. We mark our 48th anniversary this week. In fact, I’ve known her and loved her more than three times longer than when were strangers to each other.  Coming from homes with parents who enjoyed long lives with their spouses, we share a good feeling about being able to keep alive one of our family’s better traditions. And I say this knowing, first-hand, that living with another person for any length of time demands quite a lot from both spouses. Marriage involves, as Paul so beautifully put it in his most quoted wedding verse, a full measure of patience, kindness, humility, consideration, restraint, optimism, hope and endurance. Marriage may be the ultimate test of our ability to negotiate, compromise, empathize, forgive--and forget.  

Each time I hear “Dearly Beloved” pronounced by a religious cleric, a justice of the peace or even by those with temporary mail-order authorization to make it all legal in the eyes of the state, I wonder if those promising to love, honor and cherish really understand what they are getting into. Apparently not as much as their starry eyes and forever pledges would portend. The statistics are sobering.  Even though 55% of the adult population of our country is married, half of those couples will divorce, and probably within 8 years—long before death does them part. Yet marriage is such a desirable estate that many will choose to remarry, men favoring the promise of another try at conjugal bliss 12% more times than women.   

I’m not sure how many of the couples I joined in marriage as a Methodist clergyman actually made it a lifetime commitment. I’d be naïve to assume they all exceeded the national averages. Yet every time I hear of a couple celebrating an anniversary numbered by decades, I’m more surprised than when I am told that a marriage has dissolved. Living with another person is a challenge, one made more complicated by the fact that we never really marry just one person when we stand at the altar pledging our vows to each other, to God, and before those we’ve invited to witness our good intentions. We never really marry just one person? If this falls strangely on your ears, I urge you to read further. Both my own marriage and pastoral career have convinced me that it is not one, but five people we marry when we exchange our vows and rings. That’s right: not one but five.  

What I mean by this has nothing to do with any suggestion that multiple personalities or other psychological aberrations lay behind why some of us marry, no matter what single folks may think. My contention reflects some of the insights into human personality that were advanced by Eric Berne, whom some of you may remember as the father of Transactional Analysis (TA). He ventured the idea that each of us—mentally and emotionally—is a conglomeration of the temperaments of our parents, the conscious and unconscious recollections and habits of our childhood, and the rational faculties that allow us to function as adults. These “ego states” (his term—which I prefer to call personalities) are always in play in how we think, feel, react to and communicate with each other.  Since no two of us has had the same childhood or the same relationship with one or more parents—not even twins-- each of us has a mental/emotional makeup unique to our own experiences and family heritage. 

If this way of looking at ourselves and others is valid, then each time we take the step of joining with another in the covenant of marriage we do so, not only with the one who will be our legal partner, but with the different personalities that this person brings to our union.  In other words when we say we will take this man or this woman to be our husband or wife, we are actually committing ourselves to a union with more than just the figure in wedding gown and tux standing at our side. What five people are we, in fact marrying?

We are marrying someone will become our parent when we need comfort and sympathy, as we most certainly will over the course of years.  But our spouse will also offer us their criticism and judgment when we fail to live up to their expectations—just as their parents once did to them. 

And we will be marrying a person who will become our child whenever they appear helpless in the face of a responsibility or overwhelmed by fears that intimidate or paralyze them. At other times this same person will annoy or embarrass us when their words or behavior seen to us childish, silly, or careless, compelling us to correct or rescue them, or begrudgingly clean up their messes.

We will also inevitably marry someone with whom our sense of family will be redefined, our spouse becoming our sibling in this new family made in our image. As is true of brothers and sisters, we will love and defend them to the end, even in those moments when it will be hard for us to like what they say or do.

When we marry we almost certainly want to join our lives with someone whom we will be able to confide our deepest and darkest secrets and misgivings, share our most ardent hopes and dreams; a soul mate who meets us without ulterior agendas--someone who quite possibly will be our best and most enduring friend.

Perhaps the most powerful motivation that drives us to the altar is our overwhelming attraction to that special someone who stirs our passions as our lover. While the infatuations of new relationships inevitably become tempered by age and physical change, affection nonetheless finds a way of deepening as love matures over a lifetime of joys and triumphs, heartaches and sorrows shared by those committed to honoring a pledge that death alone can end.

Do you take this man, do you take this woman…? Our yes is always one carried on the wings of hope and possibility. How would we answer that question if we realized we were also taking a parent, a child, and a sibling along with our lover and friend into the marriage covenant? Whether we have been married once or have given it several tries, whether our union has made it to anniversaries symbolized by paper (1 year), tin (10 years), silver (25 years), gold (50 years) or longer, and whether in that relationship we have been more like parents, children, siblings, friends or lovers—the fact remains that we have known and been known, loved and been loved by another human being. And that, in itself, is miraculous. For it means that we have stared into the uncertainties of life—life that can be unfair, uncaring and cruel—and yet have chosen to trust, to hope, and to give ourselves completely to another. And it is in that act of commitment that we join our will, our mind, and our spirits to the very source of goodness and energy that pulses through all of creation.

“As it was in the beginning, ‘tis now until the end…” Like the wedding band itself, with neither beginning nor ending, marriage offers us the possibility of being encircled by the spirit of the One who is both the source and the fulfillment of our deepest and most enduring spiritual essence.  “May those whom God has joined together, let no one ever put asunder.”