Lessons from my own marriage: David and Marietta

Shortly after we were married, Marietta and I moved into a new house. I was determined to find the accomplishment I could achieve to endear me to Marietta forever. After moving into our new home, Marietta said, “Oh, how I would love a flower bed near the house.”So I dug her one.“You know,” she said, looking at the new bed, “soil near a house is usually foundation dirt. That means it’s bad dirt, full of old clay that came from below the topsoil when the basement was dug. It won’t grow pretty flowers.”“OK,” I said.I bought three hundred cubic feet of peat moss and a half-ton of manure and blended this with the soil in the garden. When I was finished, I presented Marietta with this rich, newly tilled soil. “Done,” I said, “it’s all yours. Are you happy now?”“Well,” she said, “not exactly. Help me decide what to plant.”“OK,” I said. For several days we looked through plant and flower catalogues, making a list of perennial flowers and drawing a garden map. Then we shopped at several garden stores until finally we had found all the plants on the list. “Done,” I said to Marietta as we unloaded the last plants from the car.“Well,” she said, “not yet. Will you help me plant them?”With a sigh, I agreed. I dug, while she put starter fertilizer in the holes and planted the flowers. After a weekend of planting and mulching, we were finished. We were now the proud owners of a planted perennial flower bed.“It looks great,” I said. “I hope you’re happy now.”“I’ve still got to water the garden,” she said. “Would you please hook up the hose for me?”I got the hose from the garage, hooked it up, and sat down to watch Marietta water the garden. “How often will you have to water it?” I asked, still sitting there a quarter of an hour later.“Every day or two in the summer,” she said.“How will you find the time?” I asked. I was thinking about how we often didn’t have time to cook a good dinner, or get the oil changed on the car, or answer a letter.“I will.”I rolled my eyes.“The plants need water. We’ll manage it together.”“I thought I was finished,” I said. “I dug the garden. I put in the manure and peat moss. I helped decide what to plant and shopped for the plants. I helped plant and mulch, and now you want me to help you water the garden?”Marietta gave me a look.“OK. I’ll buy a sprinkler system.”“You don’t have to do that.”“Well, I don’t want to spend my life watering flowers.”The day the sprinkler system was installed I took Marietta outside to inspect it. “Oh, it works beautifully,” she said as we walked the length of the bed. “It gets to all the plants. Thank you, David.” I surveyed the garden and heaved a sigh of relief.One Saturday a few weeks later, Marietta and I were in the yard studying a place on the roof where I thought the shingles needed to be replaced. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll call a roofer on Monday.” We headed back toward the house. “Can you help me weed the garden?” I heard my wife ask.“I thought you said the mulch would keep out the weeds. How much more do I have to do?”Marietta stopped. “You’re never finished working on a garden, David,” she said, as though anyone with any sense knew that much. I went on inside and shut the door, forcefully. After a while I looked out the window. Marietta had gotten a foam garden-kneeling pillow, gardening hat and gloves, and a hand-spade from the garage and was on her knees in the flower bed pulling weeds and dumping them into a large bucket at her side. After a while, I decided to pour her a glass of iced tea.“Thank you,” she said. She removed a glove and took a long drink of the cold tea, watching me over the top of the glass. Then she set the glass beside the bucket, put on her glove, and picked up her hand-spade. “I guess it takes a while to learn that the joy of having a garden is the joy of attending to it,” she said, digging around a clump of weeds. “It’s a labor of love. The pleasure comes from doing everything you can to keep it healthy and beautiful.” She glanced at me again. Apparently, I still looked unconvinced. “It’s kind of like marriage,” she said smiling, “don’t you think?”Yes, of course, I do. Creating your own love story is not something you do once and then walk away from, as you may when writing a book. It is an ongoing process. Entropy is as constant a force in relationships as it is in gardens and in the rest of the universe. Weeds, or whatever form chaos takes, are always tearing at order. We humans are happiest when we have someone to love who loves us and someone who will let us love him or her. Happy relationships require continual attention, and the joy of a relationship comes from the work of carefully maintaining it. This happiness is not something you earn once and own. It is not a product, perfectly packaged with preservatives that enhance its shelf life, but a living process that requires skill and devotion to keep flowering season after season.All human systems work by the same rules. Governments, communities, churches, families, and couples are systems. If we apply the theory of community to couples, as we have in this book, we will see that it works. The rules are the same.I believe we can create intimacy by using and enjoying our differences, but we must realize that our relationship conflicts are thousands of years old. They are part of our cultural and genetic programming. Nature selects for diversity. If you married someone genetically similar to yourself—your sister or brother, for instance—you’d damage the gene pool. We are programmed to be attracted to someone who is different. The relationship battles we experience are conflicts between all men and all women, or conflicts between classes, or conflicts between cultures. They are the consequences of the systems in our culture, in our families, and from our history.We may easily miss the fact that we play roles in our particular systems and that conflicts are natural to any system. We forget this and take conflicts personally. We defend ourselves with blame. We try to protect ourselves from a character or spiritual challenge by building a myth that he or she is our problem. If he or she would think or feel as we do, then everything would be fine. This misses the point of the spiritual challenge that a relationship provides. To grow we must ask the questions Why am I with my mate? and What do I have to learn from this relationship? A monogamous relationship offers each partner the opportunity to learn and relearn our character and spiritual lessons. In a committed relationship we always have the potential for grace and forgiveness and an opportunity for redemption.The appropriate practical question for each partner in a relationship is not Am I getting enough? or Is my partner loving me the way I want to be loved? but How well am I loving my partner? Too often we want to make relationship contracts on a “my-needs-first” basis that simply doesn’t work. Partners must be willing to push their needs aside and listen to each other before they can truly begin to receive the fruits of their relationship. The skills we are required to have are enormous. Learning them takes a lifetime. The good news is that, using a foundation of self-awareness, we can learn these skills. We can learn to speak our truth with passion and without blame. When we do, we bring excitement and adventure to our relationship. We can make our relationship a safe place to tell the truth with empathy. We can make healthy contracts and create norms that allow us to know what to expect. We can make fair trades and share in the grace that can come from a history of fairness. We can build myths of shared meaning together. Confessions can cleanse our relationship. Apologies can transform shame into honor.Being in a committed relationship provides us with the artist’s challenge. We don’t know what to expect from our medium. We can’t really control what happens. We must have the strength to make a mistake and keep on with our work, not knowing if we will succeed. We must be able to tolerate the anxiety that is part of the creative process.This hard work needs support. We need the support of friends, family, and a community. We need to share our struggles with others. A couple needs each other. But a couple who is trying to love needs all of us.Even with help from friends, family, ministers, and therapists, we won’t always live up to the standards put forth here. We won’t always tell the truth or really listen or live by our contracts or make fair trades or avoid blaming as a defense. These are standards of perfection that we can strive for but reach only occasionally.The greatest gift we as partners can give each other is commitment, the promise not to run away, not to give up, but to remain present, to stay in place, to be there for each other. You who keep this promise will discover in marriage’s shadowed valleys the truths about yourself that will set you free—free to love as best you can and to be loved as much as you will allow.