spent caring for a woman who no longer recognized him. “That’s when you realize what you’ve committed to with your marriage vows,” he said a few years after the event, sitting beside her, and their daughter, after their full and miraculous recoveries.
Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life. They are the happy ones, the blessed ones. And that is the dream of marital union that lures us on. “What greater thing is there for two human souls,” George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, “than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?”
Passion peaks among the young, but marriage is the thing that peaks in old age. What really defines the happy marriage is the completeness of a couple who have been together for decades. Gabriel García Márquez captured it when describing an old couple in Love in the Time of Cholera:
In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts….It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
We’ve all met couples like that, who have come to look alike, smile alike. I know a couple, Jim and Deb Fallows, who are famous in our circle for having the happiest marriage. They radiate a single intelligence and a sincere goodness. Another writer had lunch with them one day, saw what a joyous marriage looked like, and immediately decided to propose to his girlfriend.
In their book The Good Marriage, Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee estimate that in about 15 percent of marriages the passion never wanes. The women in these marriages, they write, tended to come from families where the father was the more nurturing parent and the mother somewhat cold. The women transferred their idealization of their father onto their husband. The men in these marriages often had lonely childhoods and had suffered losses. “These men came to adulthood with intense, long-postponed needs for love and closeness.”
One of the couples they studied was Matt and Sara Turner. “It’s always felt magical, and it continues to feel that way, thirty-two years later,” Sara said. “We both felt the magic within the first hour we met. We talked about it then, and we still talk about it.”
Another was Fred and Marie Fellini. “I was trying to think of the worst fight we ever had,” Fred said, “and I can’t remember it. But we really did fight. I just can’t remember what we fought about. One of us would flare up at the other and get over it. None of that is important now.”
This is what the maximal marriage looks like. Marriage is a decades-long commitment. It is two people who have become one flesh.
THE ASSAULT OF MAXIMUM MARRIAGE
When you look at the contemporary writing on marriage, you see a general effort to scale it back and shrink it down to manageable (and supposedly more realistic) size. Passion is temporary, the current thinking runs, so don’t trust it. A soul mate is an illusion; don’t think you’re going to find the One True Love. Alain de Botton wrote a popular and eloquent essay for The New York Times called “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” in which he downplayed the idea that we should find the person who takes us on a magic carpet ride. “We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us….There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness.”
Many modern books pick up the realist/anti-romantic theme. Laura Kipnis wrote Against Love: A Polemic. In 2013, Pascal Bruckner wrote the provocative Has Marriage for Love Failed? In 2008, Lori Gottlieb wrote a much-discussed piece in The Atlantic