Hope Helps Marriages Work Out
The two wedding invitations arrived back-to-back in the mailbox, heralding separate unions three time zones apart on the same day.
One was formal, printed in a traditional style on pretty paper scattered with iridescent daisies, and accompanied by a picture of a young couple embracing cheek-to-cheek. The other was produced on a home computer and decorated with a three-panel cartoon of Popeye wondering aloud: “Is Olive An’ Me Gonna Gets Married Soon?” It came from a pair deep into middle age informing friends of a “quiet family wedding.”
The two couples couldn’t be more different, yet each shares the two qualities humans need to commit to one another: love and hope.
Romantic love, as all who’ve experienced it know, is nerve-tingling and exhilarating, full of perfumed moments and adoring glances. But it is hope that gives lovers that value-added ingredient they need to cross over the line from dallying to daily. It takes a lot of hope to spit in the face of the one-in-two statistic, to convince yourself that it’s that other couple who will get a divorce, not you.
When two people have love and hope they can imagine a life together. These two couples have generous doses of both, gladdening the heart to know that the joining of two joyous souls is possible at any age. Granted, when lovers are young and untested, the life they imagine for themselves doesn’t usually have a stack of unpaid bills on the kitchen table, a sick parent needing care or children demanding constant supervision. There aren’t, in young lovers’ daydreams, competing priorities that can cause years of sleep deprivation.
That’s good. Life tempers all of us as we pass through it. The dreams of twenty-something lovers shouldn’t be encumbered with the hard realities to come. Better to start out with rose-colored glasses.
My fifties-something couple, however, is already into bifocals, which makes their marriage more of a miracle of faith. The bridegroom and the bride each have loved and lost before. They’ve lived together nearly a decade, feinted and parried with each other over commitment, seemed content to go along “as usual.” Then some inner need, perhaps for a feeling of permanence, perhaps to share more intimacy, beckoned them to the altar. Hope teamed up with love.
Marriage may be the toughest relationship of all. Parenting is hard, but eventually, no matter how well or badly it’s done, kids grow up anyway. Marriage takes stick-to-itiveness, continual compromise, 90-10 percent one day, 40-60 the next. I’ve stayed in it all these years by asking myself, when I’m ready to quit: “Are you better off with him, or without him?” The answer is always the same.
For whatever reasons, the young lovers and the veteran romantics who sent me invitations to their big day are ready to commit “til death us do part.” They will gaze into each other’s eyes and believe, as the Indian marriage blessing says, that “Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there is no more loneliness. Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you.”
I must get a new handkerchief. I’m going to need it.