This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Marriage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I have often thought that what helped our marriage most was that everyone was against it in the beginning.
We were introduced to each other when he was in law school, I in graduate school, both planning to spend the summer in Washington. We barely saw each other until we arrived in the new city, but June, July, and August were lovely with intimacy. In the fall we released other entanglements and, in the stressful routines of the university, depended on one another. Marriage gradually came to seem inevitable. We were adults (he was twenty-four, I twenty-three), committed to one another, ready to begin life together. What matter that his parents were Jewish and mine Protestant? Our families were much the same.
We proudly announced our engagement with a twenty-dollar turquoise ring, purchased because I thought something should mark our momentous undertaking. Then, innocent, we faced his parents, who, unreligious though they were, met our glad news with thin lips. We felt rejected, misunderstood, unappreciated.
My parents were little better. Although polite on the surface, my mother found every obstacle in the way of a wedding. An uncle was hardly civil.
And these were the relatives we heard from. We came to anticipate the anger of others-my grandmother of another generation, his aunt who celebrated each Friday with beautiful Sabbath ritual.
By spring that year, planning to marry in June, we realized ruefully that our envisioned joyful celebration, bringing a proud new law school graduate to my family and an accomplished graduate student to his, would not be as we had dreamed. My parents were unwilling to cooperate in any plans. His mother complained of the hurt to her family.
Ironically, some friends were little better. Why should I leave graduate school to marry? Why should we bother with commitment?
Before the combined weight of opposition, we were faced with an absolute choice: We could salvage life as we had known it, loving parents and grandparents, families, and communities. Or we could choose each other.
Without thinking about it very hard, we chose each other.
More than twenty years later, I see that choice as an act of unwitting wisdom. We entered marriage utterly committed to each other, already free of the strings and ties of the past.
With our decision made, events gradually turned around. A friend found a judge who happily volunteered to marry us. Faced with the possibility of her daughter’s wedding going on without her, my mother decided a home ceremony would not be so bad. His parents thought perhaps a rabbi’s blessing would be comforting, even if we were forbidden a Jewish ceremony. Our parents met each other cordially, discovering with pleasure that they shared common interests, bonded by an aversion to social drinking. (We had known how much they were alike, why didn’t they believe us?) The wedding took place, necessary forms were upheld, and we were free to begin our life together.
Now, looking back, I think the united opposition we faced was the greatest wedding gift of all. We started our life together with our relationship a healthy, strong organism, already tested, already mature. The marriage easily has withstood the irritating lumps and bumps of living and has continued to be a haven and home for us both.
lance heard marriage described as like a base camp in mountaineering, a place from which to gather strength for the assault on the peaks and a place to return for comfort or celebration. As we’ve gone through life, our marriage has seemed such a base camp. From it we each have gathered the strength and confidence to face challenges that must be faced alone, knowing the marriage, the home we have made together, is utterly secure.
Now we have two children, both teenagers, a large house, two successful careers, a cat (universally recognized as exceptionally dim-witted), and a piano, among other things. My father has apologized to my husband. Both of my parents are now very close to him. Even after twenty years, his parents have not accepted our marriage, or their grandchildren. We are very happy nonetheless and look forward to at least twenty more years in each other’s company.
