Amid the interesting stats shared by the commentators on Elisabeth’s willworkforawife.org post, Elisabeth wrote in comment #16:
I sort of go back and forth between being appalled at such abbreviated meeting to dating to engaged to married stories amongst Mormons, and awed that so many great marriages can be built on knowing each other for such a short amount of time.
What real relationship is there between successful marriage and pre-marriage familiarity? Which aspects of your potential spouse are essential to know before you decide to marry, and which are not?
I few years ago I became good friends with a co-worker. He was a fairly devout Muslim from Yemen, where he had been born, raised, and married. One day we went to lunch along with another co-worker.
My friend and I were both married, and our other companion was single. During the car ride, the conversation turned to marriage, and my friend from Yemen asked our single friend why he had not yet tied the knot. He explained that he hadn’t yet found the right woman. My Yemeni friend asked him how he would know when he found the right woman. Our single friend began to enumerate various qualifications and attributes by which she would be identified.
At this point my Yemeni friend decided to tell us about how he and his wife came to be married. His parents had arranged the marriage, as is typical in his culture. He explained that during the process he possessed a veto power to whatever arrangement his parents proposed, and that he was permitted a single photograph of his potential spouse and one relatively brief phone conversation with her before he made his decision. The were married. She moved into his parents home with him for the first year of marriage adjustment, and then they were on their own.
Our single friend responded that he didn’t think he would be able to marry someone he didn’t know like that. I’m sure many of you feel the same way.
Our Yemeni friend laughed and said that Americans were under this silly misconception. “What you perceive of your potential wife before marriage is mostly an illusion,” he declared. “When you wake up the morning after your marriage, in reality you know the person lying in bed next to you just as well as I do after my arranged marriage!”
This declaration by my friend has long fascinated me. From my own experience with marriage I can say that I believe that there is some truth in it.
Mission Presidents famously give a “going home” discourse to missionaries who are completing their service. My mission president asked our little group how long one needed to know someone before he could know if they are the kind of person he could marry? “A few months,” suggested one missionary. “Maybe six months?” tried another. “Wrong,” declared the president. “You usually know whether someone is the kind of person you could marry in about the same amount of time it takes to now whether a person you have contacted is the kind of person that could get baptized–after about 5 to 10 minutes. Not always, but usually. That doesn’t mean that you will marry them, but you know whether or not you could.”
On its face, this declaration appears ludicrous, but, like my Yemeni friend’s declaration, I believe that it is at least partially true. It may not be always true, but I think that, perhaps, it is often true.
Marriage changes so many parameters that even if you know the person you dated fairly well before hand, you know them only as a single individual. Even if your familiarity with their single self can give you a fairly decent guide to certain aspects that will continue into marriage, you cannot really know what they will be like as a spouse until they are actually your spouse.
Marriage can change people, and it often does. Having children can change people, and almost always does. When our first daughter was born, my wife suddenly found herself with motherly instincts and priorities that did not exist before. She did not exactly choose them either. These changes, brought on by the hormones associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, changed my wife into someone different than I had known before. And I found some of those changes annoying. I love her more than ever now, but at the time I complained a little.
Life changes people and whether we like it or not we cannot control the changes that may occur in our spouse after marriage–some of which are clearly inevitable and not subject to our agency.
We often spend so much time trying to find the “right” person that we fail to realize that the individual we become enamored of is not static, he is dynamic. Certainly there is a core-self that remains the same–that which makes it itself–but we run the risk of falling in love with the current trappings rather than the soul; trappings both physical and non-physical.
Other times we put off marriage until we feel confident that we have conquered ourselves–a goal that is just as impossibly illusive. I like what Ray Bradbury had to say about this approach in his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Charles Halloway is talking to his son, Will, and says:
For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace….
Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will, thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three, I figured I couldn’t marry until I had licked myself good and forever. Too late, I found you can’t wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between. That’s you, Will, for my money.
My wife is not the same woman I married six and a half years ago. I am not the same man she married. Or rather, we are the same, but changed. The, often difficult, experiences we have passed through since then have permanently changed us and redefined parts of us. And that is both wonderful and scary.
As I have said previously, my father is fond of defining faith as “the ability to make correct decisions with insufficient information.”
Marriage is truly a leap of faith.
I believe that every time a woman meets the man among all the men in the world, and a man meets the woman among all the women that he or she is willing to spend the rest of eternity with, it is a pure miracle. A miracle that happens, amazingly, all the time.
And if getting married is an amazing leap of faith and a resulting miracle, then continuing in marriage is a miracle that requires equal, continued faith. You have no guarantee that in ten years, five years, six months, or even tomorrow, your spouse will not be taken from you by death, or worse, by his own decision to abandon the truth and take up a path of sin. She has her agency, regardless of your love and your faithfulness.
And still we love, and pray that our love is stronger than death and sin. As the bard scribbled: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” We bind ourselves to moving objects and anchor ourselves to the Lord and hope that the two stay relatively close together–and when they don’t, we feel the awful pull between them, and our tensile strength is measured.
I have always thought that my marriage revealed that the Lord has a sense of humor. My patriarchal blessing promised me that the Lord would provide a companion that my patriarch described under inspiration as “a virtuous, wonderful daughter of our Heavenly Father.” And I married a woman who is not only virtuous and wonderful, but who is named Chastity. The tender mercies of the Lord indeed! Who knew that the lord liked puns!
I am so thankful that I took that leap of faith. I love her more now than I even had the capacity to love when I first fell in love with her. And even more amazing is that while in some ways I have certainly fallen well below the expectation of what she thought she was marrying, she miraculously loves me nevertheless!
And so, here at the end of my meandering thoughts, I return to my original questions:
What real relationship is there between successful marriage and pre-marriage familiarity? Which aspects of your potential spouse are essential to know before you decide to marry, and which are not?