Shouldn’t a wedding feel more like a graduation ceremony, a celebration with honors and accomplishment that is ushering a couple into in a solid future together… and less like the first day of school for two anxious children?! In today’s world with divorce so much connected to the word “marriage” I really think we may want to try and understand what’s happening before we say, “I do.”

My grandparents celebrated their sixty-fourth wedding anniversary this year.  He can barely walk.  She she can barely see. Yet when the two of them are together they smile and giggle beneath their wispy white halos like a pair of retired cupids never too tired to play.  Every time I think about the bond that they share, my heart flutters and I am inspired once again… my faith in love surpasses idealism and lands on another heavenly cloud of reality.  Tested by sacrifices and life’s many challenges, the selflessness and forgiveness that they continue to exchange without tally have loyally acted as the Best Man and Maid of Honor for these truly married souls.

According to many nationwide statistics divorce rates continue to rise in the United States where nearly fifty percent of all marriages end… and end by choice.  This can be a seriously daunting fact for those who would like to get married and “live happily ever after.” I’ve received several emails asking me why I think so many marriages are disintegrating. Clearly, this is a very difficult question to address since everyone’s marital circumstance is different. However, I do think that the answers related to divorce can be found by taking a look at how each marriage began rather than focusing on why or how it has ended.

Film and literature (including my first novel Love Nots!) has used the demise of marriage to illustrate classic, unfulfilling choices for years. In 2007 Ben Stiller starred in the romantic comedy, The Heartbreak Kid, a funny story that centers on a man who is convinced that he has finally met the right girl (a total nightmare in disguise) and so he marries her after only six weeks! While on his honeymoon and in the process of discovering who wifezilla really is, he meets his soulmate… only to lose her because of his marriage. Heartbroken, he gets divorced, pines over his lost soulmate, and then (because he has lost hope and doesn’t want to be alone) he settles and marries another woman. Afterwards he unexpectedly runs into his soulmate again (with his new wife)! If tragedy could only be so funny in our real lives… but it seems that our hearts can not laugh when they have been betrayed. In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote about the vulnerable child-woman Marilyn Monroe titled, Marilyn, who became married “To gain the seriousness and respect that was largely denied her, and to gain the fatherly protection she had been completely denied, Marilyn married a beloved American folk hero and then a respected intellectual.  Other women who had tried to marry for protection or for identity, as women are often encouraged to do, wrote to say how impossible and childlike this had been for them, and how impossible for the husbands who were expected to provide their wives’ identities.”  Flaubert’s 1856 novel, Madame Bovary, is about Emma, a woman of an adventurous nature who became bored by marriage which led her into numerous affairs, financial ruin… and ultimately suicide.  “Before she married, she thought she was in love; but the happiness that should have resulted from that love, somehow had not come. It seemed to her that she must have made a mistake, have misunderstood in some way or another. And Emma tried hard to discover what, precisely, it was in life that was denoted by the words ‘joy, passion, intoxication’, which had always looked so fine to her in books.”  Some marriages obviously begin under a condition of impossibility.

Again, I think that the answers related to divorce can be found by taking a look at how each marriage began rather than focusing on why or how it has ended.  After all… isn’t “the end” simply the natural progression of a story that began with “Once upon a time…”? So what is the beginning?  Let’s write a sample story together.  This story will start with a man and a woman and what each one of them wants.  It will also end with this same man and woman and… yes, with what each of them wants.

Let’s start by defining marriage.  My idea of marriage (most probably) will be different than your idea of marriage.  For example, I myself don’t believe that our natures (especially men’s) lend themselves to the fidelity of marriage and its societal institution. I believe that marriage is a divine institution that marries two souls and that matrimony without the grace of spiritual reverence inevitably and painfully slips from what Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) has referred to as, “the great world’s altar-stairs That slope through darkness up to God.” Some believe that one’s lifestyle and status dictate the success of marriage.  Others believe that marriage is an arrangement for procreation.  Many see it as a way of securing companionship.  Others rely on the guardianship of their basic religious dogmas to secure their marriages… and the list goes on and on.  What is your idea of marriage?

Noting all of these differing ideas reveals an obvious point as to how individuals can easily, and sometimes subtly, approach marriage in conflicting ways from the very first day… thus, we have the beginning of what I consider to be a most probable ending.

Okay, so let’s say that the couple in the story we’re writing agrees with each others ideas about marriage.  Now what?  The two of them have decided to get married.  Maybe they’re in love, maybe they’re not.  Maybe they don’t even know how to define love.  Maybe they have been honest about their fundamental beliefs, maybe not.  In time they will discover the truth, so their alleged clarity at this point in our story hardly matters, right?! It’s so much more exciting to write about their honeymoon!! (might I suggest an exotic cruise through the Mediterranean…)  What is certain is that they both want something… and herein lays the snare.  How so?  Don’t we all want something?!  Yes!  So then, why is wanting something a snare for our happily married duo?  Could it be that desires are in fact fickle and that ultimately happiness is not loyal to legal documents and obligations?  Don’t all human beings crave stimulation and refreshment from spontaneity and new sources of pleasure?  I would assume so, I know that I do!  Maybe spouses need to remember that love does not, cannot, and will not flourish under the burden of expectation or control.

Do I believe there are “right” things to want?  Absolutely not!  I do believe though, that whatever someone does want, it better be expressed and based on hard-core honesty and must be fear free. Whatever each person wants must be mutually substantial so that family, friends, and/or society at large cannot intrude or interfere in their union. So, in our story it might be that our couple has been back from their fabulously sun-baked honeymoon for some time now.  They have enjoyed sex, birthday candles, pets, maternity wards, traveling, wine tasting, holidays, family, dancing, friends, educational courses, and have experienced many other pleasures as well… along with tears, headaches, financial challenges, sickness, bad moods, and more!  As the years have passed, so have some of their initial desires and dreams… some still remain, and some have been fulfilled.  Now, how and when we write the conclusion to their story depends on one simple thing.  You guessed it! The beginning!

There’s a timid springtime breeze entering my grandfather’s room from the open window.  The walls are painted a banal hospital-white.  Aside from occasional flower arrangements, some photographs, family and friends’ vivid personalities, my grandmother’s pink lipstick (always worn for him), and the nurses’ pastel uniforms, not much color enters these corridors.  It’s sunny today, although regardless of the actual weather I always feel like it’s blooming sunshine when I see my grandparents.  There’s a part of me that will always feel like a little girl with pretty ribbons bouncing in my hair when I’m with them.  Now, after sixty-four years of marriage and memories, there is still a youthful gleam reflected as they look into each others twin blue eyes.  My grandfather can barely walk and my grandmother can barely see, yet as long as she’s wheeling him around in his wheelchair he makes sure that she knows where they’re both going!  When they’re tired they rest and hold hands… sometimes they press their soft sagging cheeks together and sing songs that I don’t know the words to from the 1930s.

A few years ago I asked my grandparents what both of them had wanted when they decided to get married.  They told me that they wanted to build a life together… I was deflated.  My own ambitions and dreams were made restless by this seemingly bland answer!  “What else?!”  I pressed.  “You asked us what we wanted when we decided to get married,” they pointed out.  “Yes!”  At this point I felt as if I was speaking in an oddly comical language as they both sat there smiling!  “We wanted to be with each other, Amber.”  “And…,” I queried.  “And the rest we knew we could figure out together,” they smiled from beneath their little white halos.

Apparently they figured it out… and they still are, because really at the end of the day no matter where the years were taking them they have always wanted the same thing.  They wanted to be together.

Ah, there goes my heart… fluttering all over again!

Amber Guidara Copyright © 2010

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