Hugo Schwyzer

Today, my wife and I mark our third wedding anniversary.

I’ve been thinking about marriage and politics these last couple of days, as the nation’s attention has turned to old “Mommy War” arguments as well as debates about family values.

And I’m thinking about the implication, made more by the right than by the left, that those who hold a liberal worldview are less likely to have strong marriages rooted in supportive communities. While everyone acknowledges that successful heterosexual marriages are found across the political spectrum (occasionally, with each partner in the marriage at a very different place on that spectrum), we tend towards a cultural assumption that those who hold conservative views seek out more community and familial support for their marriages.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned after three divorces and four marriages. It not only takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to sustain a marriage. That doesn’t mean that those who want to have successful marriages need to submit to the guidance of a particular religious leader; indeed, the “village” doesn’t need to have anything to do with an organized faith community or an extended kinship network. But having a community filled with people who want to support you as a couple, even a small community held together by a hobby rather than by shared religious faith, seems to do wonders for strengthening a marriage. My wife and I are blessed today to have friends who not only hope fervently that we will “work” as a couple, they hold us each accountable for how we grow and treat each other. We chose this network of friends, mind you — if it had been imposed, we would not have the same willingness to listen to the wisdom and challenges of those around us.

Another thing I’ve learned: monogamous marriage is one vehicle for personal transformation, but certainly not the only one. One of the many reasons why I threw myself so enthusiastically into my first set of marriages (despite being woefully unready for the challenges thereof) was because I was convinced that there was something uniquely powerful about the marital union. Somehow, after the vows were said and the documents signed, some strange sort of chemical reaction would begin that would not only bring about deep contentment for both parties, but would actually serve to change each person in the marriage for the better. In my early post-conversion days, I waxed rhapsodically about marriage as the “refining fire” that better than anything else healed the soul of both past trauma and self-centered sinfulness. I said embarrassing things like “Only in a long-term monogamous relationship can people really grow.”

And then, of course, there was my third (post-conversion) marriage, which lasted all of fifteen months. I learned the dirty little secret that nice church-goin’ Christian folk get divorced at about the same rate as everyone else. An elevated view of the institution of marriage, a sense that God had chosen a particular spouse for me, served to be an insufficient antidote to cure the myriad personal issues that my third wife and I brought to our brief and generally amicable union.

Obviously, I still believe in marriage. Who else but a true believer would have gotten himself married four times by the age of the 38? (I still don’t know anyone else married four times before forty.) But it’s at last in this fourth and final marriage, still relatively new at three years, that I’ve at last let go of what was an idolatrous view of the institution of monogamy. I learned long ago (from my mother, from academic feminism and from Twelve Step programs) that it wasn’t a woman’s job to do for me what I could do for myself. I’ve known for a long time that the magic of a marriage wasn’t dependent on having an adoring spouse. What I didn’t know, at least not on a deep level, was that the institution of marriage has no particular power to heal or to transform.

For years (and this will be evident even in some of the early postings on this blog), I continued to endow marriage with strange magical powers. Some of that was picked up in the Christian circles I traveled in, but some of that was probably rooted in my own childhood experiences growing up in a divorced household. Though I didn’t have a miserable youth, I didn’t have an untroubled one — and falling prey to pop psychology at an early age, I decided that “everything would have been different” (better) if my parents had stayed together. Thus making my own marriage work would, in some marvelous Hollywoody way, heal the damage inflicted by my parents’ divorce. It’s an old story, but rather embarrassing that I fell for it several times in succession, well into my thirties!

My wife and I today have a great marriage. Some of that is due to the usual reasons. We not only love each other, we like each other. We’re good (and getting better) at doing that balancing act of pushing the other when pushing is needed, and comforting the other when comforting is called for. We have shared passions, and though our politics do not always mesh, our view of how it is that we are called to live in the world is the same. Children, when they come, will obviously turn so much of what we have known upside-down, and yet we’ve established a pretty firm foundation upon which a larger family can be built.

I’m a lot humbler (I know, it doesn’t come across well) about these things than I used to be. To continue to persevere after three divorces, and to learn how to be a different man and a different sort of husband — that’s attributable to grace, hard work, and a hell of a lot of support from a hell of a lot of people. If nothing else, I’ve been blessed to be able to learn from some of my mistakes and to apply those lessons to this marvelous relationship today.

Marriage is not magic. Despite the claims that it is the sine qua non of stable societies, I’ve seen too many children grow up well and happy without parents being married — and too many grow up miserable in homes where a mother and father live together, to believe those public proclamations which suggest that publicly-pledged and permanent heterosexual monogamy serves as the unique Super Glue of civilization. Marriage, for some people, can indeed be that “vehicle for personal growth”. It is one way, but hardly the only way, to offer stability to the young and the vulnerable.

And in the case in which Eira and I find ourselves, marriage is a source of comfort and joy, challenge and surprise. It took me four marriages to learn the skills and develop the maturity that would enable me to be the sort of husband I am today. (Very imperfect, but better than adequate.) I am heartbroken for those who, having been divorced once, are forbidden by their spiritual communities from remarrying. They are denied what can be a marvelous opportunity for renewal, and I grieve that, just as I grieve that so many of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters are denied some of the same joys and benefits that I have known, and am knowing better and better each day.

Marriage is not the only way. But it is one way, and though it has not turned out to be the panacea for all my hurts that I imagined it would be when I was a teenager, it has turned out to be a happy and interesting adventure. As long as I remember that contentment and growth are ultimately my responsibility (and my spouse’s), and not things that come automatically merely as a consequence of being married, I look forward to more of these happy anniversaries.