Making a Marriage

Eight years ago today Jonathan and I married each other on a hot sunny day in Seattle.  He wore a tux, I wore a big dress.  Our families and many dozens of friends celebrated with us.  The flowers were lovely, the food was divine, the wines were fantastic (all from Walla Walla, of course).  We vowed and sang and kissed and were photographed and took a ride in a fancy car.  We mixed our losses with our gains and shed tears of missing with those of joy.  There are things I would do differently today but that's because we're 8 years older now and we've changed a lot.  But that being said, we loved the day and love remembering it.

I had imagined I might never get married.  I wasn't opposed to it but I didn't feel like I had to get married.  I am not a a squishy romantic.  I grow weary of fluff & flourish quickly--I am sentimental and desire richness but not the flowery or the gushy.  I also didn't love dating, and dating is sort of a prerequisite for marriage.  I did date several guys through college & my early 20s and all but one were good men.  But I figured that if the confetti fell from above & prince charming emerged from the sparkle I would be right there and recognize what was in front of me.  In fact, I sort of hoped that it would happen that way--fast & clear & smashingly passionate--and that's pretty much exactly what ended up happening!

I love being married with Jonathan.  He is kind and loyal and gets to know the neighbors.  He remembers people and continues to call someone "my friend" years after they last saw each other.  He has absolutely THE greatest laugh in the world hands down--it should be a ring tone!  He loves to dance and doesn't hide his tears.  He is philosophical and he thinks.  He's artistic and abstract and he sometimes sets things down and loses them; he also makes mobiles and does origami and leaves data models all over the house.  He likes keeping papers out where he can see them and when I swish things into piles and hide them in the dryer before company comes he gets worried we'll forget about the credit card bill.  He tracks our finances on these spreadsheets that blow my mind.  He may not know how much money we have but he takes great delight in designing the spreadsheets.  He never misses the Stanley Cup or the World Cup and yells robustly at the television during games.  When I go out with my girflriends for the evening he stays home and sautes onion into perogies and drinks vodka and the house smells like a Russian kitchen when I get back.  He is occasionally irreverant and generally not overly serious.  He's funny in the mornings, which is a big plus, and he sings in the shower and pays my library fines and he kills all the spiders.

However, anyone who has ever been married can tell you that it takes more than that.  So I thought about it--what describes the spirit of us?--and came up with three things:

     1.  We're each responsible for cleaning our own bathrooms.
     2.  We value the life in each other.
     3.  We encourage each other to be in rich friendships.

I'm sure there are other ways to describe it, but so far the best of our relationship can be described by those three realities.  Everything pretty much lines up behind their essence.

Jonathan doesn't always sing in the shower and take out the trash.  We don't always feel in sync with each other and the occasional season has felt a little more like mid-winter's wait for the burst of hyacinth.  My nightmare version of marriage is when it looks more like a merger, when there's so much "us-ness" that you can't find the two people inside it.  But with Jonathan I don't have to worry about that.  I am not obliterated in our relationship.  If anything, our work with each other is more about attending to being found than to not being lost.  And I do go flippy when our relationship's best is experienced in 3D.

I've always said that love messes with our sense of timing, and I think I'll add the spatial realm to that as well.  Just when you think things are linear and known, there's this firework...sometimes pretty and celebratory but also fire-y and bound to disrupt the status quo.  And when life is chaotic and messy there can still be this internal calm.  Sometimes the best of times all go together and there are periods of playful rest.  And sometimes the worst of times all go together and the darkness is also bleak.  But when they do, they are not the final word.

In her reflections upon marriage and ontology, Madeline L'Engle writes:

A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me,

"To say to anyone 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.'"

I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality.

I don't entirely know what that all means but I am drawn to it.  What I love most about marriage is that it is life.  Being married is different from but not outside the hallmarks of any kind of life.  Dynamic, creative, and real at its best.  And in any event, not static.  Not even tied by time.  Eight is a number.  It represents a passage of time but it does not boundary or define what has been nor what will be.  And for both what it has been and what will be, I am grateful to be in it with Jonathan.  It's right.

Happy anniversary, love!
May you live forever!

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©2011 Mindy Danylak