Me and Bec - Part 1: Marriage

It is probably worth beginning with something that has played a significant role in my life over the last couple of years, something that has forced me to grow and learn more than any other single experience, and something that I feel needs so much more clarity and honesty surrounding it.

That thing would be my marriage, and marriage in general.

I feel that talking about marriage in its own right is an insufficient endeavour, especially in light of what the word has come to define in our day and age, because for my wife and I, marriage is to serve our relationship, and the needs therein, and not the other way around, and I would go as far to say that our the current depth and beauty of our relationship is so whole and complete, that the term marriage is less relevant and not so necessary, (at least to us. The term has social descriptive function). We don’t need the defined roles and conventions of that institution anymore to define what maturity and growth in our relationship looks like.

So when I talk about my marriage, in earnest I merely speak to the relationship between my beautiful wife and me. But I will continue to use the term, as I feel my experience of it has indeed taught me much about what the term means as a contract or institution, and definitively changed my view regarding its usage.

I think if I were to speak generally, and sum up my thoughts on the matter, it would be to say that I am far less interested in marriage, then I am in honest and sincere relationships, and that marriage only remains relevant to me in the way that it serves the latter. If it succeeds in doing so, then I am for it, but such is not always the case.

To speak from my experience, the act of marriage, or perhaps even the decision to be married signified a commitment to our relationship. For a long time my commitment was wavering and in the act of proposing I solidified and decided upon that commitment for myself.

Unusually enough this is not necessarily the norm. People enjoy committed relationships with the need to signal or institutionalize such actions. And many people who do partake in marriage do so out of a desire to celebrate as opposed to affirm/commit. There is no prescriptive way to define what every marriage is, because what marriage is comes down to who’s in it.

And this I think is one of my biggest ‘beefs’ with more religious and traditional conventions of marriage; you can’t be prescriptive with relationships. People are too complicated and volatile to overly predefine them in the roles of husband and wife, especially as espoused by the more traditional and conservative views of marriage. And the expectations and standards that marriage demands of sexual expression is so unrealistic and short-sighted that from me it demands another whole post.

There is so much in the way of advice when it comes to Christian Marriage, which is the guise upon which me and my wife entered our bond, and I would argue that most of it is rubbish, for weak minds and personalities, and that screening the mountains of books for the few pearls of wisdom in between would be far too cumbersome a task.

(I occasionally read examples of what they consider to be a fulfilling relationship and I balk. They might be functional, but they are far from optimal.) Generally speaking they tend to be overly prescriptive, and whilst that can serve as a guide for many couples, I think that most (though not all) should have the maturity and intelligence to negotiate the roles between them themselves.

Marriage isn’t the end all of a relationship. Things matter more than a marriage, namely the relationship of the people in it, and just like any other relationship, they can suck big time. I have seen unions that have taken brilliants minds and personalities and anchor them down in mediocrity, and that is indeed marriage in its saddest form.

To sum up these scattered musings on marriage in our society:

Don’t worry about marriage, worry about the healthy and honest relationships.

If marriage helps you in this, with each other, with family, and/or with friends then by all means use it, but that is up to you and your partner(s).

To turn more inwardly and personal, I will now speak to my own marriage.

I will begin with a declaration of how incredible my wife is.

Bec is the love of my life, and my relationship with her now goes beyond the need for any convention. We have a commitment to help each other become the best that either of us can be, and I could not ask for a better partner to undertake that adventure with. No one knows me more fully, and there is little I fear to hide from her, even those things that I am tempted to hide from myself.

It is a relationship that I do not see mirrored much elsewhere. Though some might consider this to be a mean-spirited observation I will not shy from it. I have witnessed in my life many partnerships, many of which are highly successful, but few seem to contain this dedication to growth and maturity, this willingness to be so open and sincere, and were I not in it, I’d probably have difficulty believing that such intimacy between two people could exist.

But I must emphasize that reach such an incredible level of intimacy has been an incredibly difficult journey, requiring much introspection and growth on both our parts.

In fact it is difficult to recount the journey of our relationship without also accounting for the many experiences and introspection that lead to our own individual maturity and growth, as the two are so entwined for us.

I will begin with what so far has been the most important aspect in my next post.

For the Introduction and Contents Page Click Here.