Why We Get Married, Part 3

Grown-Up Marriage
by Judith Viorst

(Page 3 of 3)

Eventually, however, the issue of marriage will arise. Indeed, it will arise if a couple is only seeing each other, not living together. The reason it will arise is that marriage remains, for most women and men, a desirable goal. Although cohabitation is increasingly becoming a marriage alternative, although the rate of marriages has declined, although a mere 23.5 percent of American households are currently composed of nuclear families, and although (as one report puts it) "marriage... no longer looms like Mount Everest in the landscape of the adult life course," the vast majority of women and men still intend, and still are going, to get married.

Why? Let's hustle past wise-guy replies, such as, to get all those presents, to get on her health insurance, to save my mom from committing suicide, and consider the deeper reasons why men and women today continue to want to marry: Because it provides a greater degree of emotional security. Because it's "a permanent sleepover with a best friend." Because it creates a stable framework in which to bring up children. Because it's a vow to share a future together. Because it alters the way they are seen by their family and friends and colleagues and by all the institutions of society.

Here, from some of the many young married women and men I queried, are a few more becauses:

From Deb: "Because I wanted to get to hang out with my best friend for the rest of my life with everyone's blessings."

From Oliver: "Because the difference between living together and being married is like the difference between eating at McDonald's and eating at a five-star restaurant. Both satisfy your hunger, but only one of them is a real meal."

From William: "Because with family and friends and work constantly pulling at us, it was our way of saying — to ourselves and the world — that we're the most important thing in the world to each other."

From Tova: "Because I met, at the right time of my life, someone who was totally what I was looking for, and getting married meant more to me than just physically putting two people under one roof — it meant making a real agreement to try to work together to be together forever."

From Dan: "Because marriage has a religious significance to me, and it was important to me that our marriage be recognized and blessed by God."

From Heather: "Because I did and do adore him; there isn't a moment of my life I wouldn't prefer to be with him; and marrying him seemed the best way to make sure that we would spend a lot of time together."

Marla, who lived with our youngest son, Alexander, before they got married, offers this response to my question, Why marry?

She says that, after a while, living together without being married starts to feel "like you're holding out for something better." She says that if marriage represents a greater commitment than living together, then "that's the commitment I want to give and to get from the person I love. I want the whole thing." She says that marriage, much more than living together, "entangles you, making you responsible to this specific person and this life." She also says, "I was drawn to the romance of marriage, to becoming part of something that was so much bigger than the two of us."

Alexander adds: "Getting married was making a public statement that she's mine and I'm hers and we're going to build a life together."

Even a seemingly untraditional woman like Marjorie Ingall, a self-described "purple-haired, tattooed, nose-ringed feminist," wants to acknowledge publicly, in a religious wedding service, that she plans to spend her whole life with the man she's been living with. "I want to say," she writes, "in front of everyone that this is holy and legally binding, and I care enough about this person to enter into a very ancient covenant with him."

It's the public aspect of marriage, the entering into a covenant sanctioned by society, that makes it feel so different from the strictly private arrangement of living together. It's the public aspect of marriage, fortified by the law, the service, the family, the rings, that makes it feel like a much, much bigger deal.

* * *

But marriage isn't only a much, much bigger deal, argue sociology professor Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, director of the Marriage Project at the Institute for Family Values. It is also, as they exhaustively document in The Case for Marriage, a much better deal. Says Professor Waite, "We have looked at well over 1,000 studies that overwhelmingly show the strong and consistent relationship between marriage and well-being." Here's what they've found:

Compared to cohabiting couples, married couples seem to be blessed with better sex, greater happiness, longer lives, shorter hospital stays, more money, and less anxiety and depression. In addition, married couples get to live a more settled existence in better neighborhoods and have children who are less likely to drop out of school. Furthermore, being married can benefit physical health, while unmarriedness may actually be more life-threatening than heart disease or cancer. And if you consider that married people enjoy, in addition to all these other advantages, more sexual fidelity, less alcohol abuse, and a stronger sense that life has purpose and meaning, "Will you marry me?" can start to sound like one of those offers you can't refuse.

It's unlikely that many couples depend on social-science research to persuade themselves that they would be better off married. Some couples, in fact, need no persuasion at all. In contrast to those who agonize over whether or not they should go for it, there are some who, like Christopher Marlowe, ask, "Who ever loved who loved not at first sight?" and make their decision to marry with awesome alacrity.

Like Cynthia Heimel, who three weeks after she met her "wonderful dream man," said, "Yes, oh, absolutely yes," to his marriage proposal because "I fell in love with this man all the way to my reptilian brain."

Like Cal Fussman, who loved his wife at first sight because "I'd been traveling around the world for ten years and had seen about all there was to see. My instincts knew she was perfect before I could blink."

Like Al Gore, our former vice president, who met his wife, Tipper, when he was seventeen and says he knew almost immediately that he wanted to be with her for the rest of his life.

And like Jessie, my friend Jackie's daughter, who called up her mother from Vermont and breathlessly said to her, "Guess what I found today?" Her mother, bemused, pointed out that her answer could range from a five-dollar bill to... virtually anything, and that maybe she could use a little hint. "Just think about what I've been looking for, for almost my whole life," Jessie hinted. "The man of your dreams?" asked Jackie facetiously, not exactly prepared for Jessie's fervent answer to be "That's it!"

Two days later Jessie again phoned home and announced their plans. "It's all settled. We'll get married, have kids, and live here in Vermont, as soon as I finish up my master's degree." Two years after their fateful meeting, with undiminished love and certainty, Jessie and the man of her dreams got married.

For those who believe in love at first sight, in a match made in heaven, in soul mates, such certainty seems a sufficient basis for marriage. But cooler heads will argue that falling in love is a state of temporary insanity and that deciding to get married requires careful consideration and rational thought. Indeed, the extremely rational and meticulous Charles Darwin, in an act of scientific deliberation, preceded his decision to marry by drawing up two lists under the headings "Marry" and "Not Marry," mustering the arguments for (a "constant companion," "charms of music and female chit-chat," "better than a dog") and the arguments against ("forced to visit relatives," "anxiety and responsibility," "less money for books"). He finally concluded that "one cannot live this solitary life... friendless and cold and childless" and that, although being married might enslave him, "there is many a happy slave."

But deciding in favor of marriage isn't enough, the cooler heads tell us. We must also assess our chances of succeeding at it. We can't confuse alluring with enduring. We can't trust the feelings sweeping us away. We cannot be so blinded by love that we aren't able to see the person we're marrying. We cannot be so bedazzled that we ignore all the reasons why this will never work out.

* * *

Ellie, while still in college, was introduced to Norman by a mutual friend who cautioned her, "This will never work out. This will be going nowhere. He's not your type." A few weeks after they met, they decided to marry. On their fiftieth anniversary Ellie teased her friend, "Are you still convinced that Norman's not my type?" "Absolutely," her friend replied, adding cheerfully, "which only goes to show you that being somebody's type isn't everything."

Looking back on a long and remarkably happy married life, Ellie asks herself, "How did an unworldly twenty-year-old, who had never bought a pair of shoes without her mother, do so well in making this critical decision?" The answer she gives to her question is "Dumb luck." I think she is right and would add that her answer applies not only to her but to all of us who are basically happily married, to the women and men of my generation who married back when I did, and to the women and men who marry today. For even with premarital living together, and even with should-we-marry questionnaires, and even with marriage counseling and a lifetime supply of how-to-do-it books, married couples need a lot of dumb luck.

The dumb luck has to do with picking a partner who suits us — not perfectly, but sufficiently, suits not only the person we are when we marry but also the person we turn out to be. The dumb luck has to do with being compatible in ways that compatibility quizzes may fail to reveal. The dumb luck has to do with being well matched enough to be able to deal — as partners — with life's seismic changes and unexpected blows. It has to do with choosing — when we're way too young and dumb to know what we're doing — someone that we want, and keep wanting, to be with, even if we're not each other's type.

In the white heat of love, young lovers might not notice they hold different views on quite crucial matters, or might not worry much about whether their lover will be a good partner, good parent, good person five or ten or twenty years from now. But if we have dumb luck, there'll be something between us that will bind us over the decades, even when love falters and times are tough. There'll be something between us, and maybe we'll never quite figure out what it is, that becomes the glue that helps to hold us together.

So we'll need to have some luck when we choose a partner. But we'll also need to be prepared to work. Although work won't be enough unless we're lucky in what we're working with, luck won't be enough if we don't do the work. "There is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another," writes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. "That it is work, day labor, day labor, God knows there is no other word for it."

This labor, this work, demands vast stores of patience. It requires paying attention, more attention than we've ever paid before. It requires compelling ourselves, when we are sick and tired and ready to slam the door, to nonetheless leave the door just slightly ajar. The work includes not only the work we must do on the relationship but also the work we must do on ourselves.

In working on the relationship, I think it helps to see it as an entity greater than the sum of its parts, an entity that's been described as "bigger than both of us" and that I have taken to calling the "third thing." A thing with its own existence and its own rights. A thing to which we owe certain obligations. A thing on whose behalf we will, at least some of the time, have to transcend our individual needs. And so, in the fall of 2000, when the intensely autonomous Nick married his intensely autonomous Marya, I sneaked in a little advice for our middle son and his beautiful bride in a sonnet I composed for their wedding day:

There's you and you, and then there's this third thing
Which is the marriage. To it may you bring
The finest strivings of the human heart.
The "I," the "me," the "mine," the self apart
Must yield some portion of its separateness
And say a risky but unguarded yes
To this third thing, this marriage you create....

The outer work we must do on behalf of our marriage, our relationship, our "third thing," is deeply intertwined with the inner work we must do on our "I" and "me" and "mine." That inner work involves making peace with compromise, ambiguity, contradiction, and many, many different shades of gray. It demands significant self-examination. It requires us to revise and reshape our earlier expectations to meet the changing realities of who we are and where we are today. It means giving up. It means shaping up. It sometimes means shutting up. And it means growing up.

Rilke puts it like this: "For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." Love, he tells us, "is a high inducement to the individual to ripen...; it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things."

* * *

A doctor in his midthirties, when I asked him why he got married, said that "after all these years and years of impersonating a grown-up, I wanted to become a full-fledged adult."

Getting married will not guarantee this, of course, but it will provide the opportunity. For marriage, if we are lucky and if we are willing to do the hard work, can help us to become full-fledged adults. And becoming full-fledged adults can help us create, and help us sustain, an enduring, satisfying, grown-up marriage.

Copyright © 2003 by Judith Viorst

About the Author

In her long and varied career, Judith Viorst has worked as a garment district model, unappreciated secretary, and children's book editor. She has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1960, when she married Milton Viorst, a political writer. (They have achieved the almost-impossible — working in adjoining offices at home and eating three meals a day together for most of their married life.) They have three sons — Anthony and Nick (who are lawyers) and Alexander (who does community-development lending for a bank); three daughters-in-law — Hyla, Marya, and Marla; and six grandchildren — Miranda, Brandeis, Olivia, Nathaniel, Benjamin, and Isaac.