In getting married, one espouses not an institution but a person... Marriage comes to everyone, I think, with something of the same surprise, the same reversal of fortunes, the same searching exposure of deep-seated conflict. Not only that, but whatever a persons temperament or circumstances might be, it seems to me that the conflict which marriage uncovers is always essentially this same one: It is always some version of this tension between the needs for dependence and independence, between the urge toward loving cooperation and the opposite urge toward detachment, privacy, self-sufficiency. Even to people who have dreamed for years about getting married and who think of themselves as hating to be alone, marriage still cannot help but come as an invasion of privacy. No one has ever been married without being surprised, and usually alarmed, at the sheer intensity of this invasion... One can make a symbolic gesture of giving all, accompanied by a grand dramatic public statement to that effect (which is what happens at the wedding ceremony). But that is just a start. The wedding is merely the beginning of a lifelong process of handing over absolutely everything, and not simply everything that one owns but everything that one is. There is no one who is not broken by this process. Well, Married People: what think you?
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 23:37:06 +0000
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