Modus vivendi
Affection is the heart of the closer relationships, the I Ching says. If marriage is a frequent path to them, often with a family and household in tow, then it’s important to keep this in mind. Like much else in the I Ching, it reflects insights with evolutionary value, preserved across dynastic time because they’ve never lost their pertinence.
The roots of I Ching in Chinese tradition lead it to make an analogy between the family and society at large, laying out a hierarchy of gendered roles. To me, a union like a marriage is best understood as a greater whole, taking the united ones beyond their individuality to something more that challenges and affirms them simultaneously.
Having lived in one such union for 50 years, this way of looking at it, drawing liberally on affection to ease the ongoing process of mutual acceptance that makes it possible, points to modus vivendi as the best description of this joint creation’s unfolding path through life. Modus vivendi asks us to honor a surprisingly small set of principles, an addenda to Jesus’s “Love thy neighbor as thyself” that’s more explicit than He was about the need for compassion, empathy, and pragmatic concern for others.
When they’re missing, union is a forced merger, one party dictating its terms to the other or the two parties squabbling for turf. That there are many such “unions” doesn’t negate the real ones, but their legacy is a problem.
So, what are these principles? Here are six.
The first is that a union’s purpose is not to resolve the deficits of our past.
Addressing our deficits, a lifetime project, is our own responsibility. Modus vivendi means tempering them so the mutual affection that binds us to another always has fertile ground.
The second is that a mix of pattern and randomness is a union’s context.
We learn this especially from children, who alter our routines and make it clear they won’t be ignored. Struggling to impose order, we improvise and compromise, not least because we love them and they evidently love us, despite the massive disruption. We look back and wonder how we managed, but we also have a clearer sense of what life asks from us and a good deal more skill in managing it, on our own and together.
The third is that a union exemplifies Zen’s “one continuous mistake.”
“A more perfect Union” may be one of America’s starting points, but a union in our sense doesn’t aim for perfection but for what Ivan Illich called “conviviality”: life as a feast, taking in everything a feast involves, the opposite of scarcity or zero-sum. Mistakes will happen, as the Zen phrase notes, yet the feasts are celebrated and our lives ripen in the process.
The fourth is that mutual acceptance is vital, but keep the union in mind.
We arrive with our indelible natures, shaped by our upbringing. We learn to temper this at school and at work, yet we imagine that our closest unions are exempt. No, they demand acceptance, too, but we gain much by working out temporal and spatial fixes to avoid needless friction, and putting a metaphorical floor in place to support our lives together. A union rises from a firm foundation, not a shaky one, so build it well.
The fifth is to let the glass be half full, so affection and respect can follow.
Life teaches us by countless examples how our attitude towards it colors the view. Retrospect lets us consider our past actions; even then, how we see them varies. So attitude is situational and conditioned, to be taken with a grain of salt. Unions ask us to take a longer view and sometimes suspend judgement because we don’t know. Tradition is not much use sometimes because it’s based on broad generality, while a union is just the two of you.
The sixth is to be true to yourselves and let your union reflect that.
Modus vivendi means that you both redefine your union over time in response to changes in your own lives and in the lives that the union takes in. You tack toward next, the wind behind you or sometimes a straight-on gale. You may defer or abandon one next for another that makes sense in these conditions, or you may push on past it. The point is that you’re in life together, with a healthy respect for what you each bring. Affection grows.
