things you do, from leaving the cupboards open, to the way you are silent and grumpy in the morning, to the way you avoid any difficult conversation or play passive-aggressive when you are feeling hurt, as if life were some elaborate game of victimhood in which if you can make your spouse feel guilty for hurting you you will get a slice of cherry cake at the end.
Marriage involves fighting and recovery, small and large acts of betrayal, and apology. “And there’s the great problem of marriage,” the Kellers write. “The one person in the whole world who holds your heart in your hand, whose approval and affirmation you most long for and need, is the one who is hurt more deeply by your sins than anyone else on the planet.”
Things get even harder when your spouse, who loves you so much, wants to help you become a better person. Your spouse wants to give you service. But we don’t want to receive service! We want to be independent and take care of our own lives. Back when we were single nobody gave us gifts, at least not the kind that required a humiliating acknowledgment of our dependence on another person. But in marriage the big humiliation is that you need help from somebody else.
Receiving and giving gifts is the daily business of marriage. For the marriage to work, you’ve got to know your spouse well enough to love her in the way that will bring out her loveliness. A successful marriage demands and draws out types of love that were not even conceived of by people before marriage. “We can break through marriage into marriage,” the poet Jack Gilbert writes. “We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows.”
Great marriages are measured by how much the spouses are able to take joy in each other’s victories. They are also measured by how gently they correct each other’s vices. “I should never like scolding anyone else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband,” George Eliot wrote. There’s this constant internal struggle when you’re having a fight, a friend of mine observes. The ego wants you to say the mean thing that will take the fight up a notch. The heart wants you to say, “I love you, honey.” The ego responds, “Screw It. I’m angry. Say it!” You have to decide.
And that is why marriage works best when it is maximal. It demands nearly everything and gives nearly everything. Kierkegaard wrote about fighting under the victorious banner of love. “I secretly wear on my breast the ribbon of my order, love’s necklace of roses. Believe me, its roses do not wither. Even if they change with the years, they still do not fade; even if the rose is not as red, it is because it has become a white rose—it did not fade….What I am through her she is through me, and neither of us is anything by oneself, but we are what we are in union.”
Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted. At the far end, when done well, you see people enjoying the deepest steady joy you can find on this earth.
FIFTEEN
The Stages of Intimacy I
THE GLANCE
How do two strangers get to the point where they want to marry? Well, they follow the stages of intimacy. It’s never the same in any two cases, but we can observe some general patterns. In the next few chapters I’ll be describing how couples go through the various stages of intimacy. I want to do it not only to explain how marriage happens, but to show how intimacy develops across realms.
It starts with a glance. You take a little look at a person—like any of the million little glances you take each day—but, this time, unexpectedly, a spark is struck, a flame is lit, an interest is aroused. Some kindling that was already somewhere inside you gets lit in a surprising way. The person you’re looking at seems thrillingly new, but also feels familiar. Love begins with seeing. Love is a quality of attention. In some cases, maybe when the glimpser is a little older, there’s also a premonition in that glance that is a mixture of “Behold! My joy appears!” and “Uh-oh. Here comes trouble.”
Most of the times, that first look leads to nothing. But sometimes it leads to a great deal. We all know