Yesterday my son came home from daycamp with a “Certificate of Holy Matriphony.” Apparently the daycamp leaders arranged day-long marriages for the 7-year-olds. Kind of cute. Kind of creepy. The more I thought about it, the creepier it became.
My ex-husband and I finalized our divorce about two months ago, and he gets remarried in October. There are already a lot of issues around marriage for my son, and yet he is also being exposed to the idea of marriage as a wedding, as a fun and perhaps inevitable ceremony he should participate in. And there’s a lot implied, even in a fun little kid’s activity, about what marriage looks like on the outside.
This raises something I have thought about for awhile, concerning what to teach my son about relationships. In America, there is certainly a strong current that suggests that marriage is a life-long monogamous relationship between one man and one woman, and other variations are failures, or abominations, or just not quite right. That view is changing, but only very slowly.
The function and definition of relationships and marriage have changed greatly in human history (even just since recorded history), and have varied by culture. Americans of the Judeo-Christian tradition ought to know that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible was filled with polygamy – and nary a divine slap on the wrist, because marriage had a lot to do with being certain of your property (including women) and your lineage, and also making sure everyone was under someone’s umbrella of care. The New Testament stars single celibate men.
The idealized notion of courtly love in medieval Europe was based on the assumption that emotional and spiritual fulfillment would not be found in the marriage. Marriage still functioned as a guarantor of property and lineage, of political relationships, and more, but if you wanted happiness, find it elsewhere. This is not to say that no one ever loved their spouse, but that concomitant with any ideal has always been a very pragmatic reality.
Today, in much of America, there has been a hope that these things can be combined – that you can find your soulmate, make a public declaration, and keep things going for as many as 6 or 7 decades after that (many of our predecessors had a much short lifespan in which to love/suffer each other). But the reality is that with or without a marriage certificate, people usually experience a number of lengthy relationships in their life. Many of these are in serial order, but it’s all too clear that many occur simultaneously and that this is not new to our species. It’s also clear that the state definitely treats marriage as a property and custody issue. It’s very easy and quick to get married, very difficult and expensive to get out.
Now there is always the question of relationships that produce children. What’s best for the children? The problem is, you can never really know because no family is the same. The true control group would be to test a child’s life history against his or her alternate life history.
Ideal notions about relationships are dangerous, because they will not be realized by most people, leading to feelings of failure, anger, hurt, depression, compounded by external judgment from those who believe the ideal is a standard. I certainly want my child to have a real, not phony, view of matrimony.
So here is my Relationship Un-Manifesto:
• Relationships are difficult because they involve people. People who are always still growing up and changing, are damaged in unique ways, and have very different expectations and communication styles. There is no standard person, so there can be no standard relationship.
• More than once you will probably be in a relationship with a person who has good qualities. That isn’t enough to sustain a relationship long-term.
• The best you can do in any situation is respect yourself and the other person involved. Respect doesn’t necessitate a particular outcome.
• There are worse things than being alone. Figure out how to be a companion to yourself as much as possible, knowing loneliness is a part of life for everyone.
• There’s no way to avoid pain and heartbreak, whether in a relationship or leaving one.
• Guiding principle: whatever works for the people involved. There’s not much more that can really be demanded – and yet “whatever works” is also a difficult journey and target.
