Anthony here. Andrea and I have been married for two months today!
And what a busy two months they have been. :) We moved into a new apartment in a new town, we both started new jobs, and, best of all, we found out that we are expecting!
Our baby is almost an inch big!
What's amazing is how natural marriage feels. It's the biggest change of my life, but it feels very normal, very cozy, very right. I feel like I've been married for a lot longer than two months. This is life, and everything before it was in some way unreal. Before, I was missing something. Now, I am complete.
It makes me wonder at all those poor guys these days who live with their girlfriends before getting married. Marriage should be a watershed moment. People nowadays kind of shuffle into marriage, with one eye always on the rearview mirror. They've been living together and sharing finances, and they've found that they can tolerate each other on the whole; might as well make it official. But the marriage marks no great change in their lives. Maybe the wife has more security now, because it'll be harder for the guy to extricate himself. Maybe the husband stops wondering about other girls, or going out as much with the guys. But nothing fundamental changes. They wake up the next morning to the same life, essentially, that they had before.
How humdrum.
Whereas in the old way of doing things, marriage is a crescendo. It is the grand finale of a symphony, the great crest of a breaking wave, the apogee of a thundering rocket. It is the climax of one story . . . and the beginning of another. The old way of viewing marriage sees it as the making of a new, greater reality, two becoming one. It's the start of a brand new life, a new kind of being for both spouses, with a new mission — a vocation, a great calling! As Chesterton wrote to his wife, "Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.”
But I think that part of the reason for such a dull experience of marriage in our mundane modern age is that the vocational aspect has been lost. There's a perception these days that marriage is for yourself. It should serve you. So you test-drive your wife before you commit to her, and even your commitment comes with provisos. Find yourself regretting your choice? You can return your wife and look for a newer model. Kids, too, exist for your benefit. You have them on your timetable. If one comes when you do not want one, a few hundred bucks and an afternoon at Planned Parenthood (and maybe a little time spent pressuring your wife) is all that's needed to push the reset button. And why shouldn't we say that two people of the same sex can enter into the same self-centered relationship agreement? There's no good reason why not.
I greatly prefer the Catholic position that marriage is not for you, but for the family, which means you are living for your spouse (and, later, kids as well) more than for yourself. You are no longer an individual, pursuing individual wants and whims. You are a part of a greater whole: a new family. You are a servant with a specific role, bound to that role by love — real love! Not self-serving emotion! Too many marriages end as soon as love ceases to act upon a heart that passively receives it, as a man passively receives entertainment in a movie theater. As soon as love demands that the man become the agent, active, willful in his love — a far more adventurous role! — too many men turn away, looking for another non-interactive love that will sate them without thought or effort.
Granted, my idealism about love and marriage has not exactly been tested. I am, after all, married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Every day I am reminded by the mere sight of her just how lucky I am. But what a wonderful way to start a marriage! How much nicer this is than if we had spent two years living together and got married because it was convenient! I look at my wife, and I am filled with wonder. Her beauty leaves me astonished, babbling incomprehensible fragments of stillborn poetry in a fruitless attempt to capture in words something that exceeds words: the beauty of a human soul, the perfect design of a child a God, the wonder of eyes that contain a whole world, the marvelous otherness of her female nature, and the lovely herness of herself — and the startling, astonishing, impossible knowledge that all this has been given to me, to have and to hold, to guard and protect, to serve . . . and to love.
This is marriage.
All this, and yet this new beginning feels so natural and so right and so comfortable that I could have been married all my life. The newness of it helps me to see and to be astonished; the rightness of it makes me feel as though it is not new, but simply the way the universe is and has been since first the stars spun into being from the mind of God. Comfortable as an old sock; breathtaking as the first sunrise. It's a paradox that Chesterton would have delighted in — and probably did, since no man took up the adventure of marriage with more enthusiasm.
Think I'm over-idealistic? I've certainly been accused of that! Ask me in ten years, and I'm sure that my views on marriage will have developed. Developed, but not changed, not in their fundamentals. I will be wiser, the first rush of youthful enthusiasm will have been replaced by the steady appreciation of experience. But I will still believe the same. You see, the the nice thing about ideals is that even if you try and fail to meet them, you're still better off than if you have no ideals at all. And the nice thing about Catholicism is that it tells me that those ideals have a reality that does not depend upon me. Marriage is what it is. If I fail, it will be my own failure, not a failure of the reality of marriage itself. It will be because I fail to see and respond to the true nature and wonder of marriage, not because marriage lacks that reality. Because the ideal is the reality, and it is only we poor humans who fall short, whose blindness loses sight so quickly of the remarkable nature of marriage, the incredible gift of the other, the sheer awesomeness of God's plan. And that gives me the courage — not to mention to the access to grace! — not to fail. I have only to conform myself to reality rather than setting myself against it, to open my eyes repeatedly to the wonder of our marriage, and above all to place myself trustingly in the hands of the Love from whom that reality pours, and my poor, earthly, reflective love will be lifted up and brought into Love Himself, and fulfill its purpose.
Meantime, I get to be married to the most beautiful girl in the world.
No exaggeration.
Am I lucky, or what?
