There seems to be a pattern between graduating seniors and marriages. Donning the cap and jumping the broom might as well be built into the same ceremony for some. Either that or they go for the option of living together, a testing period for the big ring buying, if nothing else. Why the rush for people who are barely old enough to buy a drink? Well, it’s the expectations to settle down and start a family before you get too old. Various relatives want you to cook up a little bundle of joy.
But it’s no secret that marriage isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Divorce is rampant; children grow up differently than you mean for them to. How do you figure out which of you does what around the house? These are all concerns for a married couple, and the underlying question persists: will we all end up unhappy?
However, the risk is still not great enough that people stop getting married. They simply accept that marriage will not be perfect. This is not to say that some come in with the wrong idea, thinking that from honeymoon to funeral it will be like “Leave It to Beaver.” However, many couples looking at marriage will decide that they had better start their lives sooner rather than later. They accept, whether out loud or through a mutual understanding, that they will have little control over the ultimate decisions of their children. They even grow into the idea that happiness is a goal and not a constant state.
Yet even the most balanced, responsible couples will find themselves among the divorce statistics. This is not to say some of them don’t accept it as a real possibility. However, the fact remains. Even the best of us can fail. It’s even seeped its way into pop culture. The single mother or single father has found their rightful place in the television drama.
Though it is represented as one of life’s biggest decisions, marriage is often treated as though it has to be done now. You could blame it on biological clocks or financial uncertainty, but the early twenties are not the best time to choose what has traditionally been considered a lifelong decision. Do the partners know enough about themselves? Is there enough time to find out the big deal breakers? Living together solves part of the issue, but self knowledge is a matter only lightly touched on between the ages of 22 and 25. Once again, the problem is harder than it appears. A person this age can know themselves very well as they are but as a wise man said, “You have time to change completely.”
In past times, we might ask what self-knowledge or knowledge of the other person has to do with anything. The truth is that many of the issues of unhappiness in a marriage would have been smaller hurdles in the past. This is not because they never came up but because marriage was never about happiness and, more so, never about love. Getting married had more to do with the union of prop- erty than the union of persons. In many cultures, they will say you can learn to love. For much of the audience, this is not the case. We learn to love, and then everything else happens. The only issue with this model is that marriage is much like a stew. The carrots are inseparable from the beef. Your feelings are inseparable from the light bill. Try it. If the bills aren’t paid, if the strategies for raising kids don’t align, how many kisses can mend the booboo?
The act of mitigating issues is an act of separation. Easier said than done. It may even be painful. I love you, but are you good for me? If I want kids, are you going to raise the same sort of kids I want? A good deal of this is learned during dating, but much of it comes in the eye of the storm. What will you find out that never came up? I want the kids to talk out their problems. I want the kids to think about their problems, you know, some alone time. My mom always made us go in the backyard and choose the right switch. It’s not cut and dry, nothing is.
No one can resolve the perfect marriage. Like the people involved, it’s personal. What I suggest to the audience is that they not worry about it. “There will be time, there will be time [...] time for you and time for me, / and time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ and for a hundred visions and revisions” wrote Eliot. It’s a useful philosophy. The most important virtue is patience. Give yourself time to know and them to know. 20 more years is a long time to build a family. If a life is all a reader is interested in, then they have a life-time to build it.
