To Marry or Not to Marry, That is the Question

June is commonly considered the marriage month. I don’t know if that is statistically accurate, especially now when fewer couples seem to be getting married. As divorce itself has become more common, more couples are choosing to live together as a safer bet.

It is good that fewer people are getting married right after college in what was called “senior panic” at the college my wife and I attended. Senior panic was the phenomenon at our church-related alma mater when students in their final semester suddenly realized that time was running out for them to find a likeminded mate. Couples would form in February or even May, with engagement and wedding dates announced soon afterward. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, many of those marriages didn’t last. Panic is a poor foundation for marriage.

A decade after my own college graduation, I was chaplain and a professor at another college and officiated at a number of weddings of college students. Had senior panic played a part in those marriages as well? Perhaps, though by the 1980s, there seemed to be less panic because couples living together was more acceptable.

It seems now that more couples are asking, “Why should we bother getting married?” If marriage is simply a cultural expectation, then I agree that marriage should no longer be considered the only option in relationships.

A better question for couples to consider is “What makes a good marriage?” That’s a better question because if good marriages offer benefits not found in other partnerships, then it follows that more people would choose marriage—not as a tradition or a requirement, but as an opportunity.

So what does make a good marriage? Couples can find numerous books in any bookstore that list the skills of a successful marriage. However, while there are essential skills to practice in a working marriage, such as patient listening and willingness to compromise, those skills are hardly unique to marriage. If there are rewards to be found exclusively in good marriages, rewards rare and worth desiring, what are they?

It seems significant that it is easier to describe bad marriages than good ones. Even apparently good marriages might not, in closer inspection, be marriages to emulate. Take a marriage of thirty years or more where both partners claim to have never had an argument. Doesn’t that hint that one in the relationship has decided to never disagree, to give the other person control of what should be believed and decided? As many of the couples forgoing marriage and living together sense, love that is healthy and lasting the rest of one’s life isn’t easy to find.

By chance last week, I came across a clue to good marriages in the writings of the 13th century Sufi poet, Rumi. In one of his poems, Rumi described love as “the resurrection place.” When I read that, I knew that Rumi might have been thinking of love for God, but he also revealed what is at the heart of every good marriage and what is lacking in every marriage that falls short of that mark.

I take Rumi to mean that good marriages are not perfect marriages. Instead, a good marriage is one where the love of each partner for the other leads to resurrection, to transformation. While there are failures in every marriage, good ones offer a quality of love that helps each become the person she or he was meant to be. Rumi suggests that a good marriage, whether one in its first year or its fiftieth, is

where each partner can say to the other, “Because of you, I am gradually becoming more myself. You could have held me back, demanding that I stay the same person whom you first met, but instead you have encouraged me to grow—not just once, but time and time again. I hope I have been the same for you.”

Resurrection or transformation isn’t easy. Something has to die before something better can be born, and marriage offer endless opportunities for bad habits and patterns to die and better ones to be born. If marriage is to survive, we would do better to talk to couples in Rumi’s terms, as a journey of becoming, not simply a tradition that couples should agree to because it was good enough for their parents and grandparents.