On marriage, Part 1: A house of love

One book I love is Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. That may sound like a strange book to be quoting from at the beginning of a journey of marriage, but it’s actually wonderfully appropriate, since marriage means heading into the unknown, exploring and finding our way, together and as individuals. Being lost is often a prerequisite for discovery.

Here's what she says about relationships: “A relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think she is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers.”

I like that: a house as a metaphor for love, or marriage. Perhaps going from being in a relationship to being married is like going from renting to buying a house. In some ways, nothing has changed: it’s still the same house and we are still the same people occupying the house. And yet, it is also different. The difference comes down to commitment and expectations. When we buy a house, we are literally invested, we are committed to make it a long-term home, we are prepared to spend time, energy and money on maintaining and improving the house, adding trees, shrubs and flowers to the garden, looking after our space.

We could take the analogy further. In a house, there are many rooms, just as in a marriage there needs to be different spaces: some are rooms to work, to prepare food, to relax, or to rest, together. Other rooms may be places to be apart, to pursue our own separate interests, or to replenish our energies or to contemplate in solitude. We still share the house, but there are spaces in our togetherness.

That last phrase is actually a quote from one of my favourite writers, Kahlil Gibran, from his book, The Prophet, which has a passage on marriage. I find his writing is full of wisdom.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from marriage and from relationships – including those that failed – is that we must learn from our mistakes. I try to regularly remind myself of how I fell short before, and to pay attention so that I do not repeat the same mistakes.

There are many reasons why love fails to be enough sometimes. In my experience, it is because we can become too wrapped up in our own needs, too reluctant to make the effort – or even the sacrifices – that are sometimes necessary to look after the needs of the ones we love. It is inconvenient, it means spending time in ways that we may not enjoy, or simply doing chores and helping out when we’d rather be having fun. That’s the unspoken truth in marriage: it means being prepared to put in the hard work.

The reward is that we have a friend, hopefully for life: someone who knows and accepts us for who we are, fabulous and flawed, perfectly imperfect.