When Reality Knocks

Hello all, Henry here. I saw recently on TV Heather Mills McCartney had been giving Paul the gears. According to The Associated Press out of NY she:

“Continues her attack on Paul McCartney and the tabloid press for not stopping articles that she says have resulted in death threats against her.

‘All I can say is when we first split, I said to Paul, ‘I’m going to be crucified…you know why we split. You know the truth. They don’t need to know the details, but you need to stand up and say, `I’m responsible for the breakdown of this marriage.’”

How bizarre. It is not his fault. I know nothing personal about either one of them, but unless he is seriously mentally ill, abusive or is addicted to something terrible, it is not his fault. It takes two people to make a marriage work, or fail.

Generally speaking it takes two people to make a marriage work and two people to make a marriage fail. I remember a wedding of a young couple who promised each other that they would stay married as long “as their love did last.”

This is a variation of that silly movie “Love Story” where we are told that
“Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” On the contrary folks, love is often having to have to say you are sorry. Love is not some kind of static thing like the front step. Love is an emotion and people need to be willing to work at it to make love last.

This connects in to the modern fantasy that living together is the same as marriage. It isn’t even close. The old marriage ceremony that I used to use ran: “I, Whoever, take thee, Whatsherface, to be my lawfully wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death us do part.”

You don’t commit to any of this if you can go out the door at the first disagreement, or the first conflict in plans, or conflicting visions of the future. Marriage works because we are committed to grow up, to grow in this relationship.

When I was a boy on the farm I would harness a team of horses together and they worked side by side for the rest of the day. Often when the load was heavy for one horse, because of the nature of the harness the other would take the load. They supported each other through the day.

Marriage is no different. We are entering into a harness together and need not to bail out but to support each other during the hard times. It is a big step to go from living with someone to committing oneself in marriage.

Living together may help us discover that this person is mentally ill, a psychopath, abusive, or addicted, and those discoveries are not to be sneezed at. If the person has a problem like that that they are unwilling or unable to fix, the other person needs to get out while they still can. But this first experience of a person is only the first step into a relationship which may be marriage.

We fall in love with someone because they are magical. They are the magical other. They open doors for us that we didn’t know existed. Then of course when we live with them we try to change them so they will be more like us.

What we need to do is discover what our personality type is and that of our partner. It takes years to finally understand all the dimensions of these differences. This is part of our journey together. It is not always smooth, but can usually if not always be creative and enriching.

People make a serious mistake about the nature of love and marriage if they confuse living together with marriage or are determined that with the first friction in the relationship, they are out of there.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Relationships, Personality Type. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.