Some thoughts on marriage
At the end of August, my wife and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. We usually go out ourselves on this occasion, but we invited three of our four children, one of our daughters-in-law, and our grandson to join us at Chez Panisse (above). This event exemplified “The Founders’ Dinner,” as I jokingly refer to it, as we’re very much a bourgeois family at heart, looking to our descendants to maintain and extend our traditions.
A friend who worked for the quarterly that I founded with my wife’s sister once blurted out that my wife and I were “a most incompatible couple.” On paper, it seems true: we’re opposites in many trivial respects, but on the fundamentals, we’re not. We find the same things funny or appalling, love our children, and theirs, unconditionally, and make room for quirks and differences within a household we’ve organized spatially so we both enjoy it. Somehow, we made it through the main “barrier gate” of marriage, which is to shift from the passion that gets a family going to the family itself.
Every marriage is its own thing. Children figure or don’t, and even the family figures or doesn’t, so my thoughts here are necessarily personal and partial. It’s helpful to explore how others dealt with it. I wrote an essay, “Marriage, Family & Friendship,” pointing to the artist and designer Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s older sister, who went as far as anyone in rethinking what a marriage could be. More recently, this has been a theme of the fiction I’ve been writing, inventing several families to play it out.
When we married, we were asked to vow to welcome children. When I was 26, I woke up one day with a pressing desire to have them, as if a switch had flipped. The first of our four was born two years later, immersing us in parenthood. Once you have two children, you might as well have eight, in fact, and you look back in wonder that you succeeded in establishing a household, educating them, slowly solidifying things and weathering the storms. Marriage unfolds and you deal with what arises, situations that reveal what actually matters to you both and how malleable a marriage can be if forged as the gods intended.
There’s an element of destiny to it or perhaps an element of inexplicability that my reference to the gods reflects. If things get dicey enough that you seriously ask yourselves if it’s worth it, you discover that while marriages are made in heaven, divorce is a creature of courts of law, lacking nuance and inimical to what a bourgeois marriage deems important. Vanessa Bell stayed married to one man her entire life, which I always felt made complete sense. You only need one, in reality. And the rest, whatever it proves to be, comes along as the marriage itself gravitates toward family and looks increasingly past the couple to their heirs and familiars.
Children, if and when they arrive, play havoc with everyday household life. They’re not us, yet they are ours, one reason we’re on the planet and among the best reasons to stay here, especially in the middle years when they depend on us and we, the parents, depend on each other. In time, children leave the household. What we do for its and their sake dominates our lives less, and we give more time to our own work, as we think of it.
All along, of course, we’re giving our own work such time as we have. What constitutes our own work isn’t exactly clear, not even later in life. We see what comes naturally to us, but we’re also testing ourselves against our ambitions. Over time, we ripen, understanding that we are who we are in the end, with a nature that’s uniquely ours that we express in particular ways that evolve with us, shaped by life itself. We learn finally not to compare ourselves to others, but to consider only how the work we do serves our purposes, whatever they are. When I took up weaving 11 years ago, the studio where I wove embraced a motto, “There are no mistakes,” that was a crucial one in Japan, where it originated and where many are dogged by perfectionism and master–apprentice relationships that are toxic or abusive, often, much as they can be here in academia. “Our own work” is what Aristotle called “leisure,” which speaks to its roots in play, the heart of how children absorb the world and take pleasure in it.
Marriage is said to “take work,” but this is a misunderstanding. A relevant text is the “instructions to the cook” that Soto Zen founder Dogen Eihei set out: “Done in the proper spirit, being the cook in a monastery of 1,200 monks is a surefire shortcut to enlightenment.” Marriage too has a proper spirit that’s very much like the serious play of children and lovers, done for for our enlightenment, not for mere utility. A marriage is not a job.
Marriage is about family because the family provides the support its members need at different points while prompting them to take a longer view that’s a necessity in the face of life’s vicissitudes. The Buddhists assert that “death is the great question” and our lives are about learning to live with their finitude. They value being over having, and a bourgeois family like ours nods in agreement, but adds that while having has its reasons, what the family passes down is its buoyant spirit, its faith that each new cohort of its members will make their mark in a self-determined sense, and its mutual love, admiration, and respect, earned at birth and expanded as familiarity reveals each one’s remarkable differences, all the nuances of who and how she is. Growing up, our children found each other a constant annoyance, but they and their cousins are a tight bunch now, a family.
So, yes, we have our incompatibilities. I’ve come to feel they’re predictive of a long and fruitful marriage.
