The Marriage Book (19 page)

• and last, but most important, that the person you marry can fulfill all your needs, economic, physical, sexual, intellectual and emotional

HAYLEY NAVEY

“THE 5 BEST THINGS ABOUT BEING MARRIED,” 2013

Hayley Navey was nineteen when she became pregnant and got engaged to a boyfriend she had first met in high school. In addition to blogging on
A Beautiful Exchange
about young motherhood, inspiration, faith, and daily life in Greensboro, North Carolina, she occasionally offered observations about marriage—including its unexpected joys.

The ellipses are the author’s.

In case you haven’t gathered from everything on this little blog, I really like being married. I hope that if you are married, you love it too and can understand where I’m coming from.

SEX

Is my mind in the gutter? Maybe. Either way, you married folk know I’m right. Having experienced this in the context that God designed, as well as outside of that context, I can say with full confidence that it is one of the greatest gifts He gives to married couples. It is a great act of service to your husband, along with all of the great emotional parts of being intimate. Sorry if it is still awkward to talk about S-E-X. Oh well.

COMING HOME

It’s so nice to know that I will never go to bed alone. I am such a cuddly person and love that I have my amazing husband to curl up with after a long day. Call me a scaredy cat, but I can’t sleep until he is home. I think he secretly has that same problem. Shhh!

DOING LIFE

Obviously,
this is one of the main reasons you get married. I love my husband and love that we get to experience pretty much everything as a
team
. With each memory, he sees things differently. It’s so nice when we talk about past times and I can throw out what I loved about it, then hear his perspective. I just love the conversations that begin with “Remember that time . . .”

GROWING

I hope that you have the privilege of being married to someone that makes you want to be a better person. From the very beginning, my husband has encouraged me to do more and be more. He is constantly guiding me and helping me along (even when I don’t ask for it . . .). I can honestly say that I am a better person in Christ because of my husband being in my life. In the end, that’s really all that it’s about, right? Both of us getting closer to each other by getting closer to Him.

MY SHOULDER

When I’ve had a bad day or something has just really gotten under my skin, I know I can always go to my husband with it. Sometimes he will remind me that I shouldn’t let things bother me so much. Sometimes he gets upset too and agrees with me. Sometimes he just quietly listens and recognizes that I just need someone to spill the beans to. He’s the best best friend ever because I
know
that he is
never
going anywhere. I love that my heart is not as full on days that we don’t see each other very much. It makes my day just to tell him about mine and hear about his.

F

FIDELITY

HOMER

THE ODYSSEY
, CIRCA 8TH CENTURY BC

In writing his great saga, Homer (dates unknown) ensured that the name Penelope, wife of Odysseus, would become nearly synonymous with the word
fidelity
. Famously, while he is off fighting the Trojan War (and having literally epic troubles returning from it), she keeps a band of suitors at bay by saying she cannot consider marrying anyone until she has finished weaving her father-in-law’s burial shroud. In the following passage, one of her suitors explains how she manages to draw that task out.

For three years now—and it will soon be four— she has been breaking the hearts of the Akhaians, holding out hope to all, and sending promises to each man privately—but thinking otherwise.

Here is an instance of her trickery:

she had her great loom standing in the hall

and the fine warp of some vast fabric on it;
we were attending her, and she said to us: “Young men, my suitors, now my lord is dead, let me finish my weaving before I marry,

or else my thread will have been spun in vain.

It is a shroud I weave for Lord Laërtês,

when cold death comes to lay him on his bier.

The country wives would hold me in dishonor

if he, with all his fortune, lay unshrouded.”

We have men’s hearts; she touched them; we agreed.

So every day she wove on the great loom—

but every night by torchlight she unwove it; and so for three years she deceived the Akhaians.

JOHN DRYDEN

“WHY SHOULD A FOOLISH MARRIAGE VOW,” 1673

British poet laureate John Dryden (1631–1700), who married Lady Elizabeth Howard in 1663 and had three sons with her, wrote this as a song for his comedy
Marriage à la Mode
.

I.

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decay’d?

We loved and lov’d, as long as we could,

’Till our love was lov’d out of us both;

But our marriage is dead,

When the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

II.

If I have pleasure for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me, Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain

Is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE
, 1829

Between his novels, short stories, and essays, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) had a seemingly limitless number of observations to offer about marriage. The following is the first of several entries in this anthology (see
Honeymoon
;
Power
and
Sex
) from the famed French master who, at the outset of writing the ninety or so novels and short stories that comprised
La Comédie Humaine
, produced several lengthy meditations on marriage.

Love is the union of desire and tenderness, and happiness in marriage comes from a perfect understanding between two souls. And from this it follows that to be happy a man is obliged to bind himself by certain rules of honour and delicacy. After having enjoyed the privilege of the social laws which consecrate desire, he should obey the secret laws of nature which bring to birth the affections. If his happiness depends on being loved, he himself must love sincerely; nothing can withstand true passion.

But to be passionate is always to desire.

Can one always desire one’s wife?

Yes.

It is as absurd to pretend that it is impossible always to love the same woman as to say that a famous artist needs several violins to play a piece of music and create an enchanting melody.

D. H. LAWRENCE

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER
, 1928

First published in Italy,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
wasn’t available in England until 1932 and not printed in full until its 1959 U.S. edition. The novel, one of thirteen written by British author D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), became infamous for its sexual explicitness. For Lawrence, fame remained after infamy subsided, one of the reasons being the complex portraits he drew of his characters’ inner lives. In the scene below, Connie Chatterley’s husband, the paralyzed and impotent Clifford, has just asked her to consider continuing a semblance of his aristocratic line by having a child with another man. At this moment, Connie is already having an affair with a writer named Michaelis.

The ellipses are the author’s.

“Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very deeply . . . You had that lover in Germany . . . what is it now? Nothing almost. It seems to me that it isn’t these little acts and little connections we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they? Where . . . Where are the snows of yesteryear? . . . It’s what endures through one’s life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections specially. If people don’t exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the life-long companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing . . . that’s what we live by . . . not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That’s the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.”

Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.

PAUL NEWMAN

PLAYBOY
INTERVIEW, 1968

Paul Newman (1925–2008) was famous first as an actor (
The Hustler
,
The Sting
,
The Verdict
, and ten Academy Award nominations), then as a philanthropist (donating an estimated $250 million from sales of his Newman’s Own food line). But he was also renowned for his marriage to actress Joanne Woodward, which lasted—despite their Hollywood roots—an exceptional fifty years.

In 1979, actor Roddy McDowall photographed Woodward for a book of portraits; during the session, Woodward said: “Someone once asked me what it was like to be married to the sexiest, most beautiful man in the world. I thought a minute and replied, ‘Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat!’ ” Just a decade into their marriage, this is what Newman said about Woodward.

RONALD REAGAN

LETTER TO MICHAEL REAGAN, 1971

A few days before Michael Reagan’s wedding to Pamela Putnam, the future United States president wrote this letter to the son he had adopted with his first wife, Jane Wyman. The advice notwithstanding, Michael’s marriage lasted only a year. His second marriage, to Colleen Sterns, endured.

Dear Mike:

You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the “unhappy marrieds” and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is,
somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back on an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick, and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.