As a marriage counselor, I think about marriage a lot — as a cultural reflection, a social construct, a legal bond, and an institution. Marriage means many different things, depending on your vantage point. Are you single and hoping to marry? Are you married and looking to divorce? Are you hoping to enjoy some of the benefits of being unmarried while still remaining married to someone you’ve loved and cherished for decades?
Marriage as an Activating Agent
Marriage is a palimpsest that has been erased and rewritten and adjusted, carrying with it all the layers of its history. It’s been a vehicle for upward mobility, an economic strategy, a political trading ground, a form of life insurance, a method of social control. And yet there’s also something in marriage that extends beyond the practical. It’s a container where disparate elements come together, combining in unpredictable ways. Just as vinegar and baking soda in the same space give rise to carbon dioxide, two people who marry also create something new and often surprising.
The explicit and implicit boundaries and restrictions involved in marriage function as activating agents. Sometimes, a healing dynamic unfolds, an upward spiral of transformation and learning opportunities disguised as crises, released in the interactions between two distinctly separate but equally central-to-their-own-existence human beings. Adults are gestated and born, with the capacity to see a bigger picture together than they could see alone.
When they first fell in love, these adults may well have been adult impersonators, puppeted on the strings of their own wounded inner children. Committed partnership can transform aspects of us that are still impersonating adults. A true adult is a relational Jedi: an individual who uses the force of love to sees beyond their limited viewpoints, and stretches themselves into accepting otherness in their partners and in the world around them.
A “Failed” Marriage Can Be A Springboard
When couples use marriage poorly, it still has the power to alchemize. With the fantasy of love fulfilled on one end of the spectrum and the stranglehold of a deadening conjugal commitment on the other, the gap between what’s real and what’s imaginary opens into a desolate abyss. The marriage container may become a trap or a coffin, providing evidence that seems to prove the worst stories a person has come to believe about themselves and others . Even then, marriage has the potential to be used as a springboard to a bigger truth.
Do What it Takes… or Deepen Your Misery
We’re all relationship researchers. Every day, at jobs, in friendships, in families, we’re running in vivo experiments, doing our own messy field research on love. In our interactions, we collect data about the aspects of our own character we embrace and the shadow aspects we deny. We learn not just about our pasts, the ways our childhoods shaped us, and the impact of formative experiences on our ability to relate to others — we learn about how much we can or can’t accept ourselves. If we’re savvy, we re-adjust our hypotheses daily. Either we do what it takes to create sustainable changes and effective improvements in how we relate to our partner or we deepen our misery.
Here are five guiding principles to help you fail-proof your marriage:
- Change your expectations. It’s not about being happy.
- Your marriage can always succeed, whether you stay married or not. Use marriage to embrace your humanity, and by extension others’ humanity.
- Give up the myth of Love From Without. We marry to ‘get’ love reliably from someone else, but what marriage shows us are the ways our addiction to control gets in the way of loving ourselves and others.
- Recognize the Importance of Love From Within. The more we can accept, celebrate and appreciate our imperfect partners, the more we can do the same for ourselves, and the more we can accept, celebrate and love ourselves, the more our partner’s are encouraged, through our example, to love themselves and us.
- Think of marriage as Yoda’s cave in Dagobah (humor me, I know it’s a stretch). It’s a place for relational Jedi’s to test their mettle and connect with the Force. It’s a container for you to experience your own vulnerability in your interactions with another who will always elude your control and always challenge you to grow into your full potential.
Originally published on Medium.com
Photo: Pixabay