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"Partners and Marriage"
by Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

I
have never met a man who didn’t want to be loved. But I have seldom met
a man who didn’t fear marriage. Something about the closure seems
constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for
what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within
our lives.

When I was younger
this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my
friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual
fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do.
Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty
in their dealings with each others. I looked at older couples and saw,
at best, mutual tolerance of each other. I imagined a lifetime of
loveless nights and bickering and could not imagine subjecting myself
or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I
would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other’s
presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each
other and tolerant of each others’ foibles. It was an astounding sight,
and it seemed impossible.

How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the other’s habits? What keeps love
alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other?

The
central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the
claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad
relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to
succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a
good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see
clearly in the early stages.

Sexual hunger draws you to each
other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to
the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually
survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial
overwhelming sexual fascination. Some people choose to involve
themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual
attraction in order to see what is on the other side. This can work,
but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual
side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from
their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of
unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having
any normal perception of what life would be like together.

The
truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends
before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know
each other’s laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other
at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they
get swept into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This
is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of
your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for
other keys to compatibility.
One of these is laughter. Laughter
tells you how much you will enjoy each other’s company over the long
term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the
expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world.
Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh,
you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each
other, you can always keep the world around you new. Beware of a
relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate
relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour.
Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to
turn you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your
relationship can become on being critical together.

After
laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you
respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see the
relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them.
They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power
of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the
relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again.
If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can’t
accept, you will inevitably come to grief. Look at the way she cares
for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you
love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you
do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you,
eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look
also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on
the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart
resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery
of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only
to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance
doesn’t become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling
isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you
must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our
hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of
life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot
nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in
her, you will find where you share the business of life, but never
touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there it is
only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures
that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.

So
choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner
with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take
place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a
miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word. There is a miracle in
marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the
most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon
becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child.
We never question these, because we see them around us everyday. To us,
they are not miracles, though if we did not know them they would be
impossible to believe. Marriage is a transformation we choose to make.

Our
love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot
know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will
come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good.
If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be
flawed. We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative
transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that
always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I
was younger.

It never occurred to me to question the dark
miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was
unable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be
transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more
meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was
the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be
left with something lesser and bitter. But there is positive
transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a
slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand
blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories
intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presence, two separate
consciousness come together and share a view of life that passes before
them. They remain separate, but they also become one.

There
is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I
had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there
are not traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from
celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains
within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow more
fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it
alone contains.

But
only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the
knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one. Those
who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared
company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment
that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex. So
do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong
reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of
transformation.

If you believe in your heart that you have
found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient
faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken
and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to
embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you
may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then
wait. The easy grace of marriage well made is worth your patience. When
the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom… endlessly

- excerpt from email