Meditation on marriage, 2. Oneness and twoness.

During the course of our discussion about privacy, D began musing about my reference to the practicalities of marriage. She even suggested that one of the awful parts about my marriage to Wife was precisely that Wife had "tyrannized" over me with all the practical, administrative headaches of day-to-day, thus killing off any romance. D tried to argue, on the contrary, that daily practicalities shouldn't contradict the more romantic side of any relationship, arguing that there is nothing incongruous about a mistress ironing a shirt or planning a dinner party. Well, that hadn't been the point I was making, and I think the true story of my marriage is more complex than that. But I also thought that this wasn't the perspective I was trying to communicate. So I wrote back to D as follows:

When I think about the differences between an affair and marriage, interestingly enough, the practical side of marriage isn't the first thing that springs to mind. Or to put it another way, I think there is nothing incongruous with an affair about your skill at ironing a shirt or putting together a dinner party. No, where I see the biggest difference is in the contrast of one-ness and two-ness, so to speak. To put this another way, in a marriage you are (generally) creating not just a life (as a man or woman) but a household; and that household itself will have its own way of life. So in one way or another, the two of you need to settle on that: either by compromise, or by one giving into the other, or something. (Sometimes the accommodations can be a little nuts: I remember one coworker telling me in all seriousness, "Well I'm a cat-person and my wife is a dog-person, so we settled on birds.") This drive towards one-ness affects a lot of things: what surroundings you choose, how you spend your money, and so on. And while there can be allowances made where each spouse can retreat into "his" or "her" private space from time to time, still the dominant personality is the corporate person of the marriage or the household itself, as a unit. As a one-ness.

I'm not saying this at all well, or at all articulately, but that is where I think I see the biggest difference. In an affair, the two retain their two-ness. You and I share many things in common: we both love books, we both (for now) live with cats, we both ... [fill in the blank]. But as long as what we share is an affair and not a marriage, we can share the commonalities without having to adjust the differences. Oh in some ways we will -- in truth, perhaps even in the deepest ways. If I hold one opinion and you hold the opposite, I have to stop and walk around my opinion, to rethink it. In the end I may decide I was wrong, and I would never have rethought it without the question or challenge raised by your disagreement. But where a difference proves to be a pure difference, it doesn't have to be ironed flat to be made the same. Again, I'm not saying this right: I know that in reality there is no mandatory compulsion in marriage to make all differences the same. Of course not. But the common identity of the couple or the household -- seen almost as a third person in some weird way -- does have a magnetism or pressure to it that I think does not manifest the same way in an affair.

Now that I think about it (and I didn't realize it this way before tonight), that may be related to what is special about discussing money. Your mileage may vary, of course. But I think that, for me at least, having to come to a common agreement about how to allocate our mutual money fairly between us (to pay for a visit, for example) feels eerily close to the situation where it is no longer your money or my money but the relationship's money. And that, in turn feels very close to setting up a one-ness, not a two-ness. Since I have not been well-served in the past by handing over my money to such a one-ness -- not your fault, not anything to do with you, but my experience all the same -- I think I have gotten unreasonably skittish on that score. But it may be a while before I unlearn that behavior.

D's answer was long and lyrical -- I had some trouble just now figuring out how to edit it -- but I think she kind of missed the point I was trying to make.

I'm not sure quite what to make of your one-ness v. two-ness discussion, but I find it fascinating. It seems as though the cruelest injury inflicted on marriage is administration, if I can use that word to characterize what you mean by setting up a household. I'm not sure how to respond to the stifling way you present marriage; I suppose rejection is the only option. It sounds... well, so young. I don't mean that your concerns are immature, but they seem awkward in middle-age. Perhaps a young wife can present herself as a helpmate, promising to build a castle of comfort and love for her spouse and to be all things to him, wife, mother and sisters, but no mature woman would dare to be so presumptuous. Such a woman has no idea how to be loved, and there is no imagination or creativity in the one-ness you describe.

Perhaps it comes down to having different clocks. I certainly am not worried about tomorrow with you.... Dragging around the future wears a person down, just as Wife's past wears her down and limits any possibility of joy and delight today. I'm not convinced that a marriage has to be a wholly planned economy.... All relationships are subject to two threats: a foreseeable end and fragmentary presence, which might discourage us, but in fact they intensify the mood, not in some desperate attempt to hold on to the other, but in recognition of humanity's covenant with time. The one-ness you describe seems to be some covenant to extort foreverness from God's insistence that all things are fleeting,and nothing is really ours. A marriage, just like an affair, does not have to ask for security against the world's fate. We can embrace it, knowing that our fate gives our union vitality and beauty it would not otherwise have. No imposition of an institutional one-ness will hold back the dark, and perhaps only the married can pretend otherwise.

Hosea, my desire to be with you does not deny my awareness that being with you is both a homecoming,and an appreciation that you are so different from me that you open a as many windows as my advent calendar holds in anticipation of the savior's birth.... The one-ness imposed by marriage is no valid excuse to resign from living, to get one's views and opinions second-hand or to avoid the hard work of finding out who one is or may become. that said, marriage cannot help but contract one's horizons in some measure. One is no longer looking for a mate or sexual partner, but that ought to free one to look in other directions, to explore whatever captivates the spirit. It seems to me that a decent marriage could liberate your energies to discover your real work, which certainly does not mean re-ordering your spouse's life! Structure and order, if done well, could be as beautiful as a flower arrangement and demand the same meticulous care. Does a marriage demand that you fall in love with the ordering process and thereby smother the relationship in logistics and money management? Maybe, but I remain more optimistic....

To be your mistress demands that I have to be a whole person, with personal accomplishments of my own. The institutional aspects of marriage do not have to limit that possibility; the truth is that to claim your personal inheritance is work. To renounce personal growth and passionate love for the "one-ness of marriage" is to make a mistake; it's not giving as much as giving up. The world is still teeming with life and treasures; our task is to receive whatever we can from the Creator. We are commanded to multiple our talents, not bury them in a hole because God is a 'hard master'. Study something, learn something, care for something, risk...in marriage or an affair, the challenge is the same.

So I tried to clarify by starting again in a different way:

As for the discussion about marriage ... you know, I had the feeling, as I was writing down my thoughts about one-ness and two-ness, that I was saying it in a jumbled and incoherent way -- and it's true, I must have been. I realize this because I don't actually disagree with anything you say in response; but I think that you may be answering what I wrote rather than what I was trying to write. (smile) That my ideas were something of an inchoate fog to begin with didn't help anything, of course.

So what was I trying to say? Maybe I can start with what I wasn't trying to say, and build from there. I wasn't trying to talk about the end of personal growth; the one-ness that I have in mind is fully consistent with both partners accomplishing things on their own, mastering different areas on their own, learning new things, and growing independently of each other. Even if you and I married, I could certainly imagine an afternoon where I sat reading about Plato while you sat reading about modern history; then as we made and ate dinner, we would share what we had learned with each other, ... and might even find the most remarkable points of connection between two subjects that look on the surface almost totally unrelated. Nor was I really trying to talk about housework and bills and the "administrative" side of setting up a household. The word "household" was probably a bad choice, in fact, precisely because it does conjure up these administrative images. What I was really looking for was a noun to describe the one that had been made out of two: perhaps I should have said "couple" instead.

What I was trying to describe was something that I think is an inherent, inescapable part of the logic of marriage itself, and which is not necessarily a bad thing. In marriage, there really is a sense in which two become one. And this happens in the process of making hundreds of routine decisions. One spouse wants pets and the other doesn't. One spouse likes to have fresh flowers around and the other doesn't really care. One spouse wants to write a check out of the common bank account to buy This; the other would prefer to buy That. And all these decisions are negotiated one way or another. I assume that most of the time, in healthy marriages, the decisions are made lovingly, considerately, and with no hard feelings. They may be made with only minimal awareness that there was ever a disagreement at all, especially if each spouse rates the other one more important than some ephemeral decision about decor or groceries. And yet, at the end of the day, decisions are made. At the end of the day, either the couple has a new pet ... or they don't. Either they have fresh flowers in the house ... or they don't. Either they bought This, or they bought That ... or neither, or both. And so on. And there are hundreds of these decisions, these choices -- little bitty ones, for the most part. Hardly worth noticing. Only ... it is by my choices that I define my character. So the sum of all these choices will, over time, build up a recognizable character. That character won't be quite the same as either spouse individually, unless one spouse is so controlling that he gets his way 100% of the time. (In most marriages, that's unlikely.) So it won't be either one separately, but it will nonetheless be a very definite character, ... a character that might as well be seen as a person, a unique person, some third person who is neither the husband nor the wife but the Couple taken together organically as if they were one. Those hundreds of choices will, over time, add up to define the character of the marriage. And it is this character, this "third person" who is the one-ness I was talking about.

This "third person" isn't the same as either spouse. I didn't mean to suggest that the two partners submerge all their individuality to try to become as alike as possible. But in some ways this "third person" is the most important one, because it is "he" (it) who determines what face the couple turns towards everyone else. It is even "he" (it) who determines how the couple raise their children. Are the kids allowed to chew bubble gum? Watch television? Do they have to have regular chores? Do they have to sit down with their parents for regular meals? It is not possible for the parents to enforce different opinions on these questions and still live together. If the parents are divorced, they can say "It's OK to chew gum at Mom's place but not at Dad's place (or whatever)." But as long as they are raising the kids in the same house, they have to come to an agreement. I mean that this is a logical necessity, not a moral exhortation. If one parent wants to enforce a rule that the other parent won't enforce, then ipso facto that is not a valid, enforceable rule. The "third person" -- the character of the Couple -- doesn't accept that rule. So one way or another, the couple makes a decision on each of a hundred questions related to child-rearing. Sometimes the "decision" reached by the Couple as a collective or organic body is different from what either parent would want individually. But one way or another the kids figure out what the real rules really are ... and whatever character those choices add up to define, that's the character of the Couple.

This one-ness is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there is an argument that anybody who has never had to devote himself to some purpose larger than himself, has never grown up. Marriage provides that "larger purpose." For good or ill, the "third person" -- the collective body of the Couple taken together -- is bigger than either spouse individually. So even those who have never done ten minutes worth of service for an army or a church or a school or any other community you can name, ... even they can have the experience of working for (or "serving") someone (the Couple as a collective, organic entity) bigger than themselves. It is exactly this feature which makes marriage such a powerful educator. It is exactly this that makes me say that if I had stayed single, I would be just as immature today as I was at the age of 21. So it is not a bad thing. Obviously there are some ways that it didn't work out so well for me personally, but that was a kind of accident; it wasn't anything built into the logic of mariage as such.

So when I contrasted the freedom of singleness with the unfreedom of marriage, that was meant to be more neutrally descriptive than evaluative. There are some ways in which too much of the wrong kinds of freedom can be very destructive; as a result, I think we have to recognize that freedom itself is not always, in every situation, an unqualified good. It all depends on what kind of freedom and what the alternatives are. But sometimes (and I think that healthy loving marriages are examples of this) less freedom can make everyone better off than more freedom would.

Yes, it so happens that these days I find freedom looks a lot more attractive than it once did. But again, as I said, that is kind of an accident applying to me in the here-and-now.

The whole discussion started when we talked about our friend, whose counselor told her to read her fiance's back e-mail. You said that for her to read all that stuff was sad and out-of-line. I agreed 100% with "sad" but I demurred at "out-of-line," saying that it would indeed be out-of-line for an affair but that it might not be so wrong in a marriage. I'm not sure I can spell out my thoughts completely, but I think this one-ness ... this "third person" ... this collective, organic character which is the Couple independent of either spouse individually ... I think that this is somehow at the heart of my sense that reading private e-mails is not necessarily wrong in a marriage. The point is that the two of you are part of one body, a body larger than either one of you alone. Any decision that either of you makes will -- almost inevitably -- affect the other in a direct and immediate way. And if the other is going to be affected, he or she has the right to know about it. My left hand has a right to know what my right hand is doing, because they are both going to have to live with the results. And so marriage requires -- at least in principle, and at least potentially -- far greater transparency than any affair. The two partners may read different books, excel at different things, grow in different ways ... but they have to know what to expect from each other. There is still plenty of room for privacy-in-the-sense-of-autonomy, but I think in the end there is less room for privacy-in-the-sense-of-concealment.

If this were a speech and I were striving for a stirring rhetorical finish, I'd stop there. But in the interests of philosophical exactitude, I have to at least hint at two massive qualifications to the preceding paragraph.

The first qualification is an easy one: it answers the question, "OK Hosea, does this mean you should be transparent to Wife about our love for, and involvement with, each other?" The answer is, "No, but then Wife and I are no longer married except in the legal sense of the word, so the whole argument doesn't apply. My legal decisions will affect her. Some of my economic decisions might affect her. But my emotional decisions can't possibly affect her, because that bond has already been broken. So if I wanted to buy another house, or move to Libya and surrender my American citizenship, she'd have a right to know all about that. But our affair? Nope."

The second qualification is more difficult. But what about the infidelity-blogger community? Am I condemning my friends for not telling their spouses? No, but it is a little hard to explain why not. Let me say rather that all of us in the community are (to greater or lesser degree) walking a highwire. If we manage not to fall, and if everyone can live happily ever after, ... then that's great. We've dodged the bullet. And in that case it is possible that all the spouses will be happier not knowing. But it is so easy for this to go wrong ... for a seemingly innocuous dalliance to end in heartbreak and ruin. And if that's what's gonna happen ... well shucks, in that case maybe it would have been useful for the other party not to have been blindsided by it. I don't mean to speak ill of my friends here. But I am trying to say (and I think it is undeniable) that affairs can be very risky. All I can say is that I also think the other members of the community would all agree with that part.