Marriage

January brings a rash of statistics: last year’s average temperatures compared with previous years, rates of inflation, economic figures and – inevitably, perennially - marriage break-up statistics.
According to the newspapers, this time of year is divorce season. People reviewing their lives, in the bleak light of January sleet and post-Christmas overdrafts and overweight, don’t like what they see. Then they shift their gaze to their partners and think there at least is one thing that they could change.
Or so the newspapers would have us believe. And January is cynicism season for newspapers (or more-than-usual cynicism season) so the portrayal of human nature and relationships is as bleak as the climate.
In the past year, three couples we know personally have broken up, in different circumstances – two after long years of marriage and one young couple after only a few.
It seems to confirm the testimony of the doomsayers who believe that marriage has lost its staying power – that young couples don’t try hard enough to ride out the storms and older couples are no more secure in their perseverance and loyalty.
But one statistic that I’ve never read – and that would be hard to quantify – is the number of people who have relied on marriage in the wrong way, who have turned the lifetime vows into a life sentence and inflicted them on each other as a form of abuse.
The generation who married during or after the Second World War, for example, had an excellent overall record in remaining married for a lifetime.
They had known young men and women slaughtered in battle and bombing raids.
Those who survived counted themselves blessed to find partners with whom to settle down and raise a new generation, after all the carnage.
So many were bereaved – of husbands and wives, and of potential future partners – that this was a generation that believed marriage was a privilege, worth any effort to preserve, worth putting up with imperfections and inconveniences, and even with far more serious issues such as drunkenness, adultery, domestic violence or abuse of children.
The marriage statistics for that generation look good. Older people often quote them as the ideal and compare present-day statistics unfavourably.
But no statistics are available for the people who tormented their partners, day after day, year after year, with their righteous certainty that marriage should be for life – no matter what.
There was an unspoken (‘For better, for worse, remember?’) relentlessness behind each unkind comment, unfunny joke, refusal to forgive, rigid resistance to change, unpleasant habit and refusal to compromise. Over the years, indifference became contempt – a stifling atmosphere in which one partner struggled to breathe and the other one closed all the windows and doors and bolted them.
On paper, and maybe even to other people around them, those long-term, faithful marriages looked good. They certainly made good statistics. And some of them, thank God, relaxed and relented into good marriages over time, after ten or 20 or 30 years.
But the ones that survived but strangled the life out of love so frightened the next generation, and the one after it, that they were prepared to sacrifice statistics and their own standards of success, and run a mile when they saw those first telltale signs of contempt in their partner’s eyes, or voice, or vocabulary, or actions.
Some undoubtedly ran too soon, and lived to regret not staying to fight for their right to respect.
Others left, blaming their partner, and lived to learn from their own lack of respect and self-respect when they found the same problems challenged them in subsequent relationships, or the lack of them.
Some stayed, and increasingly lost confidence, security and sanity.
Some stayed, and witnessed a bad relationship mature and suffer and eventually turn into something that strengthened them.
I’m inclined to think that all of them required courage, because marriage demands that. The very nature of the marriage relationship challenges every person who engages in it, in the most intimate and personal aspects of their lives – their security, identity, integrity and maturity - every day, in ways that no other relationship does.
Staying or leaving, learning from mistakes or repeating the same ones over and over again, standing up for your rights or quietly suffering and praying for a better day – it all deserves to be recognised as an achievement and, I think, celebrated.
It doesn’t translate easily into statistics – succeeded or failed, positive or negative, sadness or joy.
But it’s real and it’s live and it’s brave.
A toast to every husband and wife, and to every would-be and wannabe and afraid-I-may-never-be husband or wife, and to every used-to-be and tried-to-be and got-too-tired or got-too-afraid-to-be husband or wife, this January.
May God bless every one of us in 2008, with comfort and with courage and with hope. And with the kind of love that only God can supply when all else fails.