Meditation on marriage, 3. Marriage as education.

D responded to my long thoughts about one-ness and two-ness with her own rather extended meditation. I won't repost it all, because it is quite long and there are stretches I'm not sure I understand yet. But one remark of mine that she picked up was the part about marriage's educative effects. She wrote:

You are right to say that marriage is a tremendous education.... I also agree with you that marriage is not so much the outcome of love, sex, or maturity, but the most available road for most people. Marriage is the next logical step in human development after childhood and youth and to marry is to invite growth, which in turn encourages more growth and a wider field.... Marriage and family are the natural extension of the human condition and whether the marriage is happy or unhappy may not be as important as the fact that it completes your growth. And then what? Do you end your marriage or fall into a pattern of routine and boredom?

There is an alternative, but it is hard. I think one of life’s major challenges is to put off what is outgrown, even when it was true in its day and has served us well.... To fail of that is to fail, period, and that failure is bitter, because it is unnecessary. Each individual can change this, but we often refuse to do so. When we can say, “I choose to do this,” or “I find the world exciting ,” rather than ,”He mistreated me,” or “She never understood me,” we will be adults and capable of true love.

When marriage has fulfilled its promise of rounding out personality, it is easy to say that we have fallen out of love, or were never in love in the first place, or that one partner has betrayed the other. These charges may be true or not. What really needs to be considered is that here we both are, stuck with a self, and needing to decide what is to be done with it from this point on. How we arrived here is much less important. Sometimes I think I have found an answer in my work, or in caring for others, but these are no substitute for genuine love. The real challenge is not to give up, and I know that possibility is very much with me.

In my reply I tried to restate this back to her, to be sure I had understood what she was telling me. She has not yet answered whether I got it right or not, so the possibility remains that I am completely confused. But what I think I hear her say here is pretty interesting.

Your letter develops a remarkable theory, one that truly I have never heard before. I don't know if I agree with it ... and in fact I really can't tell yet, because it involves a way of looking at things that is so new that I will have to try it on for a while before I can tell what I think. What I'm referring to is your theory about why marriages (sometimes) decay. You start from my observation that marriage is tremendously educational (although I think I might have said only that it "can be" educational, or at any rate that mine has been). But you proceed from there to say that this is part of the meaning of marriage -- part, if you will, of the design or intent or purpose of marriage, that it further our education in how to live a human life as a man or woman, respectively. The consequences of this shift are enormous. Hundreds of people, after all, have spilled gallons of ink on the question why marriages (often, perhaps even usually) go stale. Some people write as if the spouses themselves are doing something wrong. Others -- for example, Ryan & Jetha in Sex at Dawn -- argue rather that we are simply made for sexual variety, that we need it almost like we need food; so that monogamy cannot help but end in monotony ... and that it then cannot help but finally terminate in a celibacy like that of brother-and-sister. But you, if I understand you correctly, propose an altogether different theory. It is simply this: marriage is designed to be part of our education. Therefore, when we have mastered the lessons it has to teach us, we naturally get bored. Who wouldn't get bored, after all, if he were forced to repeat fifth-grade math every year until he graduated from college?

I see one easy objection to this theory, but it is just as easily met. The objection is: if marriage is like math class, then why don't all (or nearly all) spouses get bored at exactly the same rate? Most fifth-grade teachers teach the same stuff in math class; and most students have mastered it by the end of the year. So why don't we see all (or nearly all) marriages ending in one, five, seven, ten years ... whatever the number is, why isn't it always the same number?

The easy answer is that while marriage is a part of our education, the number of lessons it is designed to impart can be open-ended. It all depends on who the partners are. What I mean is that there are a few lessons that are common to all marriages everywhere, ... or at least all marriages that more or less match what you and I mean by "marriage." But this is a class where the Teaching Assistants have broad latitude to assign extra credit -- sometimes lots of it. If the partners are intelligent, interesting, and engaged, then in addition to learning lessons about interrelationship or parenthood, they might teach each other lessons about community service or long-term mentorship or ... gosh, any number of things. And so they might interest each other longer, by learning more from each other. (And naturally that interest might carry back into the bedroom as well.) And if not, not. But in any event, the absolutely critical part (and what is fundamentally new) is the assertion that if and when husband and wife lose interest in each other, it is not because either of them has failed, and it is not because they are fighting a fundamentally recalcitrant inner nature. It is rather because they have succeeded in doing what they were supposed to do, and so now the time has come to move on to the next class.

At any rate, that's what I think you are saying. And it is, truly, a radical rethinking of what marriage is about. It will take me a while to flesh out the implications of this vision, ... all but one. One of them is obvious: if the disinterest which a long-term couple feels for each other is a sign of success rather than failure, they should greet it with a kind equanimity or even joy, rather than sorrow. This in turn has to mean that they should support each other in whatever steps are necessary to graduate into the next grade and the next set of classes. In our society the way it is built today, that means welcoming a no-fault divorce; but honestly in many cases (not mine) a legal divorce might be a wasteful and inefficient way of proceeding onto the next class. What might serve many couples better (assuming the marriage was healthy to begin with ... unlike mine) might be some kind of recognition or permission that after X years it is simply time, quietly and tactfully and with no legal fuss or bother, to look abroad. After all, no fifth-grade teacher resents it when his or her students pass on to sixth grade ....