Meditation on marriage, 1. Privacy and transparency.

A little over a week ago -- I guess it was not long after I wrote my "Penthouse" post -- D and I began a conversation that turned into a rather interesting and involved meditation on the nature or meaning of marriage. As with all the best conversations, it didn't exactly start that way. Or at any rate, let's say that where we started was pretty different from where we ended up.

It all started when we were discussing a couple we know who is planning to get married. He had a number of indiscretions in his past, and they were proving to be a big hurdle for her. The two of them got some premarital counseling, during which the counselor suggested that he simply give her all his e-mail accounts and passwords, so that she could set her mind at ease about his past. And the last we heard from them, they were on their way to living happily ever after.

D remarked to me, though, that she was a little uncomfortable with this outcome. She wrote me:

I still think that [our friend] is setting herself up for disaster. My thoughts aren't filtered or well organized, but ....

Who we love matters tremendously. As I wrote last night, it shapes our entire life. Our model for love, of course, is God himself, and the essence of God is his mysteriousness.... Yet some of us cannot help but fall in love, deeply and eternally, with the Divine. We are called to be 'inflamed with love' for God, and in doing so, we learn to love others and risk activities that would otherwise leave us trembling in fear.... Worrying about bank accounts, computer passwords and the like is involvement and agitation with low and earthly things. If I was concerned about such matters with you, they would leave me feeling listless and unhappy, not closer but more removed from you.

Sweetheart, Allan Bloom may have been right when he declared that friendship is a higher gift than love.... But for friendship to flourish, neither the friendship nor the friend can be seen as an object to be possessed. If I am to love you, I must also give you privacy and freedom.... Personally, I have also suffered from excessive emotional involvement, when I focus on every comment you make and become clingy and insecure. [Our friend] seems at risk of the same in [some of the stories we heard from the two of them]. That's a danger; if our love doesn't warm others, even those who know nothing of our relationship, there is something wrong.The fire of love can be extinguished by too much attention as well as not enough attention. Above all, there is our passion for truth.... The source of all truth is God himself, and that doesn't mean complete self-disclosure, but rather the knowledge that you are loved, beyond all reckoning, for ever and ever. The union of hearts and minds is the goal, and I staunchly hold that all the 'transparency' our friend is demanding from her fiance will not achieve that union.... I will never know you completely, but I will grow in gratitude for our friendship and love. Goodness...already I feel as though the two years we have shared have been the richest ones I've known. Just one true love and friendship has made all the difference, because for me, you have affirmed that love truly is at the center of existence, no matter where we might find ourselves. One love...and the universe unfolds as it should. I don't need to know your password :-)

Of course at one level this was tremendously flattering to me, and in that respect it was nice to hear. But I also have to admit that it left me feeling a little uneasy. After all, in years past I have certainly snooped into Wife's text messages and e-mail accounts: you know this because I have printed many of the transcripts in this blog, and I have discussed the contents of others. So where did D's remarks leave me? Trying to feel my way here, I wrote back:

I can't help agreeing with you that when you have to start worrying about passwords and accounts and reading e-mails to other people, something important has been lost. Of course, that's the place where I have found myself with respect to Wife -- and it has been for years and years. But that only goes to support my point, that something has been lost by the time you get there. And I think that this loss is somehow (among other things) key to the difference between a romance and a marriage.

Naturally the best marriages are also romances, or at any rate we always hope that they are. But marriage requires far more than romance. Among other things, the real-world practicalities of marriage require -- quite unavoidably -- what you called "involvement ... with low and earthly things." You write that "for friendship to flourish, neither the friendship nor the friend can be seen as an object to be possessed." Absolutely true: but a spouse (even, perhaps, the marriage itself) is in some ways a possession, or else a possessor. Because of the way that marriage functions in our society -- I'm thinking of everything from community property to access to minor children -- it can feel like an obligation to fret over a spouse's online flirtations, to need to know a spouse's password, to check those accounts for incriminating e-mails or photos. Why an obligation? To be prepared in case the spouse goes crazy over this other person with whom he/she has been flirting, and decides to empty all your accounts and take the kids abroad. [And of course there were times I feared Wife would do exactly that with Boyfriend 5.] In a pure romance, by contrast, that kind of worry makes no sense. You can't abscond with my savings or abduct my children. And so I am free to ignore those "low and earthly" considerations, and to pay all my attention to the love we have for each other, to the high quality of our interactions themselves (in person or in writing), ... to the qualities of our souls (and also bodies, I guess) that drew us together in the first place. From the perspective of pure romance, that is a far better place to be.

D's response covered a lot of territory in a very lyrical way, and I'm not sure I understood all of it even now. But her comments about privacy were clear and to the point:

I do know violating someone's privacy as a condition of staying together is wrong on every level. If you don't trust the person to behave with minimal decency, the relationship should dissolve, and that's true for an affair as well as a marriage. I do not admire you for reading private emails and demanding financial information from the woman you decided to stay with. Such behavior seems to diminish everyone involved and is unlikely to prevent mis-behavior from the other party anyway. For example, Wife will lie, cheat on you, and spend money in crazy ways no matter how much you monitor her behavior. You either decide to accept it or you leave. If you really can't trust her to keep your children stateside, the relationship is so far gone as to be unsalvageable no matter how much you spy on her.

I had several thoughts about this. One addressed the practical question of how I should have handled the situation with Wife. Should I really not have read her text messages and e-mails? Really? That part of my answer ran as follows:

I would like to sympathize with the case that you make for not snooping, and at one level I even agree with the fundamentals of what you say; but there are places where I feel I have to demur, albeit gently.

The first such place is the one where I find myself today. You write, "If you don't trust the person to behave with minimal decency, the relationship should dissolve, and that's true for an affair as well as a marriage." I would answer that if you don't trust the other person to behave with minimal decency, then the relationship has already dissolved ... at an emotional level. But the emotional level is not always the only relevant level -- certainly not for a marriage, where there are (minimally) legal and economic levels as well. And of course if children are part of the picture, that adds on still more levels. Now it is possible to argue -- you have -- that in the absence of trust, all those other levels should dissolve too; and in the long term I would agree with you. But doing that takes a while; and it is also possible to argue -- I have -- that sometimes it is necessary to await a propitious moment before setting the dissolution in motion. In between times, there may be practical reasons that it is useful or prudent to keep the legal and economic relationship (for example) even while the emotional one is in tatters. And in that case, I think it can be useful to insist on full transparency as a temporary measure, until the relationship can be terminated properly. In the event that the partner is not inclined to cooperate with such transparency, it can be an act of self-defense to bring it about unilaterally. By snooping. Of course that means that the trust which sustains an emotional relationship is gone. But the legal relationship might still be in place for some time. We have discussed (debated, argued) the advisability of maintaining a legal relationship where there is no emotional support for it, and I don't want to revisit the arguments on both sides right now. Suffice it to say that I can see this situation as a practical possibility, however far it is from any ideal we would either of us want to honor.

But there was another side to my thoughts as well. Do we really have to hide secrets from each other at all? It may be practically necessary, but isn't there something dull and leaden and unromantic about that too? I'm thinking of the same kinds of ideas that were flitting through my head back in 2008, when I wrote this piece here. And so I wrote her:

The only other thing I wanted to say about privacy is that in some ways, compared to the loftiness of which love is capable, it sometimes seems to me a rather sad or low or unfortunate ideal. Or perhaps those aren't quite the right words: let me explain a little more precisely. What I mean by "low" in this context is that privacy, as an ideal -- as something it is "wrong on every level" to violate -- is no more than a necessary concession to our fallen state. In a perfect love relationship -- in the kind of love we hope to experience the other side of Jordan -- privacy should become totally unnecessary, even pointless or irrelevant. In that kind of perfect love, perhaps the way the angels love each other, you should be able to know every single one of my faults and love me anyway; and I, yours and you. That is, after all, the kind of love we already hope for, from the One Who already knows all of our faults better than we ourselves do. You have said that His love for us should be a model for our love for each other. Since there is no room for privacy in His love for us, that makes me think there is something a little sad in the fact that we even need to concern ourselves with privacy here on Earth, at least with respect to those we love most deeply. I know we do. I know we can't abandon privacy, any more than we can walk naked down the streets or make love in the public parks. But there is a small, romantic corner of me which finds that sad.

Of course she demurred at that: privacy is a bigger issue for D than for anybody else I know. But her answer also seemed to me subtly off the point. Only after thinking about it for a while did I come to realize why:

Privacy beyond the River Jordan...perhaps you are right, but somehow, I doubt that we will know the fullness of God, even as resurrected and eternal beings. There is a depth to existence that is divine on the deepest level and so remains somewhat mysterious and beyond analysis. We often mistake privacy for that reality, but perhaps a concern for privacy only protects us from a fundamental arrogance that denies such dignity to another. Totalitarian states remove the right to privacy from citizens in order to privilege the state, but this activity only insures the destruction of millions. For me, to cherish privacy is to honor your humanity; it's to insist that you are separate from me and have your own reason for being that is not subject to my will. Certainly on earth, this seems valuable, although we pray everyday that "...thy will be done, on earth as it is heaven...." One day perhaps all things will be known...but it might be possible to love completely without full knowledge. Jesus seems to have done so, and he freely admitted that he did not know the Father's plan in all respects. We can know now that if we truly love each other, the flaws we do see in the other will be forgiven and accepted. That faith seems possible without reading email and texts sent, or knowing every move made by the other. Personally, I find my trust in you builds my belief in our love...it's not so much what you can do that concerns me, but what you will do that gives me the confidence to love you dearly.

Totalitarian states? What the fuck ...? Are we on totally different pages here?

And then I saw it.

Your last long paragraph about love beyond Jordan has cleared up something important for me. When we talk about "privacy," you and I, we are thinking of subtly different sides of it; and I think that accounts for why we speak about it in different ways. For you, privacy is a concept closely related to autonomy: to preserve someone's privacy inviolate is to accord him the basic respect due a human being, while to deny him privacy is in some sense like making him a slave. But when I wrote you last night, and during all our discussions in the past, I always thought of privacy as closely related to hiding or concealment. So when I wrote about privacy as a "sad" ideal, or as a concession to our fallen state, what I meant was that maybe someday -- across Jordan -- we can be secure enough in a perfect love not to be afraid, even in the dark corners of our hearts ... not to feel compelled (out of fear) to hide or conceal or dissemble, lest we shock or alarm our beloved. I don't imagine that we can know everything, of course; I can't conceive of what that would be like. But I can imagine what complete security might feel like. I think, for example, of how the denizens of Heaven act and speak in The Great Divorce: "I am in Love, and I will not go out of It." (That example just occurred to me now, as I was typing.) Thinking about them some more, I am confident that they all respect each other's autonomy, and yet none of them seems to feel any need to hide or dissemble. So, ... is privacy a relevant concept for them? I think you would say yes, and I would say no. And so we must have been talking about different things all along.

Cool -- I didn't understand that before today. I am glad to see it now.

And it really does interest me to realize that the concept of "privacy" can mean two such very different things.