Marriage Mondays
August 20th, 2012 § 2 Comments
One
If marriage isn’t a place you go to get all your dreams fulfilled, if the point isn’t to protract the thrills of infatuation, then what’s the point? It can’t be an institution evolved from our drive to procreate. If procreation is the goal, there’s got to be a more efficient way, no? Before I got married someone told me, “The goal of marriage is to become one with another. Oneness.” That’s the goal? That’s funny.
Fourteen years in, I can’t think of two beings more different than me and my wife. My wife likes organization and structure. She’s one of those who will write an item on a list so that she can cross it off. I’m uncomfortable planning a week out in advance. My wife likes touch; not too many things in life is as good as a good massage. Me? I can’t think of anything worse than a stranger grabbing and squeezing me. My wife cries watching commercials. I can count the number of times I’ve cried in my adult life. Usually, somebody has to die. I can go on, but you get the point.
I don’t think we’re the exception either. In general, men and women couldn’t be more different. The way we think, our response to problems, our interests. Everything from communication to sex, we approach things from very different places. I’ve even heard that our brains are different – something about testosterone severing synaptic connections in the corpus callossum in the early development of the male brain. Let’s face it, we’re different.
Two becoming one is a mathematical impossibility. A conundrum. Two beings this different becoming one? That’s just plain funny. And precisely why I believe it’s true. Like I said, love is not what I fancied it was. Neither is life. Why should marriage be any different? The goal of marriage is oneness. Yes. A mystery – a beautiful mystery.
Yep. Made me think of this:
18 “There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
19 the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a woman.
–Prov. 30:18-19
Hey, sorry for the tardy reply. True words. We’re so into things working. So into figuring it out. Everything seems to have an answer. But in reality, so many things right there at the top of the list of importance in my life have no clear answers. They offer no guarantees.