No One Can Stop You From Being Happily Married

Thoughts on my 20 year anniversary

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

It’s perfectly warm in the room, in the way that you can’t feel because it matches your own temperature. The first glow of daylight is making its gradual, almost imperceptible emergence through the window.

My wife crawls out of bed, but I have no desire to move.

I’m still lingering in the mood of our conversation and connection. We've been happily married—for twenty years this week—and I found myself thinking how a happy marriage has to make room for so much more than textbook happiness.

I was a terrible communicator when we first got together. I’d bottle my fears, worries, and desires. Slowly, after two decades I’ve learned how to share my thoughts with my partner instead of expecting her to be a mind reader.

We’ve had plenty of rough spots, bumps, and emotional bruises. But through it all, we haven’t stopped participating in the living organism of marriage and its need for continuous food and shelter—which is primarily accomplished through communication.

We are literally only still together because of the words we have uttered—the values we have shared, the appreciations we have voiced, the confessions we have exchanged, the fighting words we have volleyed and withstood, and the deeply nourishing silences we’ve embraced. For the first ten years of our marriage my wife used to say, “You need to learn to be able to laugh at yourself more.” I hated that she said it—and I hated that it was true.

I can hear the padding of my partner’s familiar feet as she recedes down the hall. I know those feet so well I can imagine what they look like in the motion of walking. Okay, I admit it, I adore my wife’s feet.

Somehow the random arrangement of my arms and legs have left me feeling like a work of art myself—a sculpture of limbs on the linens. All of me askew—yet nothing out of place. Michelangelo himself would have left me this way I imagine, artistically happy with the adjustment of my fingers and toes, the angle of my head, the lazy flutter of my half-open lids. Both artists and marriage have a way of capturing a person as they are, endorsing the imperfections, sanctifying the eccentricities.

I know who I am through the eyes of another person—someone who’s been willing to say the things I never wanted to hear and always wanted to hear.

“You’re being selfish.”
“This is brilliant.”
“Planning is not your strength.”
“I love the sound of your voice.”

When someone communicates with you this way, it rubs off over time, and you learn you can love yourself and be honest with yourself at the same time. In fact, they are the same thing.

After a lifetime of practiced denial and self-delusion, I’m learning to be honest and even take delight in the full range of blessing and catastrophe that I represent. I am both reliable and reprehensible on any given day, and I’m willing to have a conversation about it.

That has been the gift of committing to marriage.

Participation is marriage, I believe.

When you go all in, in relationship to anything, you are mirrored to yourself in a way that is never reflected in the absence of commitment.

No one can stop you from participating, and by extension, no one can stop you from experiencing the challenges, joys, and breakthroughs of marriage—partnered or not.

I can hear the shower running. My wife has moved on to embrace the leisure of Sunday morning. I still have no desire to move.

It takes time to learn how to touch another person properly, to listen openly, to receive without defense. The same way it takes time to tease music out of a piano, free art from a carving, or use words to touch somebody’s heart. A fast-food, microwave world makes it easy and convenient to rush past, forget, and miss the context of marriage—which is, in part, a vow we take in a moment—but it’s also a long apprenticeship that requires time in, just staying by the side of a partner, a discipline, a garden, a pet, or community.

I’ll never forget leaving home in the car together to get groceries one day in the Arizona heat. I was eating a popsicle to stay cool. My partner was hooked into a downward spiral of intractable worry. Anything I might have said to pull her out of it risked making her feel alone and unheard. But she needed an intervention.

“Thwap!”

Without thinking I took my popsicle out of my mouth and whacked her in the cheek with the sticky mango treat.

There was a moment of stunned silence—and then she broke into peals of laughter. We cried tears of appreciation for the silliness of her worry and absurdity of my spontaneous assault the rest of the way to the store.

Yesterday in the kitchen, which we always seem to descend upon at the same time to prepare food, I made a reach for the one favorite knife we both love to use, but which she’d already claimed for her food prep.

“Uh-uh!!” she said with a tone of authority that perfectly matched the one she uses with the dog. It cracked us both up—but life works so much better when you’re honest, authentic and clear with your communications.

Going all in is the secret.

When we vow for life to remain loyal to a specific relationship it’s just a symbol of our willingness to accept being married, irreversibly, to life itself.

Our relationship to our thoughts and emotions, how we move through and express ourselves in the world, the jobs we seek out and sustain, our hobbies, how we handle money and food, the way we care for our own bodies, or treat the earth—these are all frameworks of holy matrimony.

Finally I turn in bed, roll luxuriously toward an edge and lower my feet to the warm wooden floor. I take a snapshot of my satisfaction with the intention to carry it forward. Can I be happily married to life today?

I think of how simple it all is.

Connection.

That’s all that we really want and need, whether we’re in a traditional marriage or not.

The desire to entwine is built into our higher nature, but the fear of vulnerability also keeps our survival instincts on alert. Our previous wounds render us aloof even as we long for closeness. Everything we write or say, every glance, move, breath and gesture is a message to the universe and its human ambassadors about how available we are, or are not, to the process of life. Everything we express or withhold is an act of communication.

When we are tense, depressed, scared or unsure and we say nothing, that is an act of communication. We are asking the rest of the world to follow us into despair, to collapse with us on the cosmic couch, to give up, to cave in.

Or when we surrender to the flow of expression through art, or song, or sharing in conversation or writing, let the muse choose us and find us, pluck us out of the masses as the chosen delivery vehicle for the poetry of the universe—that is also a communication.

Every moment of our lives and every thing we share or skirt sends a signal to our circle—to our children, our partner, our parents, our colleagues, our customers, our students, our readers. Our words or the lack of them do not exist in a zone of neutrality. The cosmos is shaping itself and forming itself around the pillars of our expression. When no pillars are erected, there is chaos, confusion, disorder.

Marriage can only happen after you admit that you matter.

It can be easy to forget sometimes in the midst of this spectacle—this crawling, undulating, unfolding phenomenon we call life—that it isn’t solely a show to observe. It’s an invitation to a conversation. You can entice it, seduce it, invite it, direct it, stop it, usher it to places unimagined with your voice, with your actions, with your words.

Whether or not you can be happily married just comes down to who you think you are. Someone whose words deserve to be caged and hidden, suppressed and protected? Or someone whose inner rhythms and arising sounds are divine signals, created not by you, but delivered through you into the concert hall of life.

What will you withhold?

What will you deliver?

There can be no marriage without your willingness to express who and what you are, not with another person, and certainly not with the thing we call life.

We’re called to a lifetime of practice in our expressiveness. We’ll likely struggle. We’ll experience misfiring conversations, misspoken intentions, false commitments, and empty declarations until we finally string together an expression of truth that shatters the noise of popularity, convention, and the illusion of separation. Until we admit to who we are and commit to offer it—which will make all the struggle worthwhile.

"Should I express myself?” you ask, like you have a choice.

You are already singing your song into the ethers, even when you choose to remain silent, because you are here. Marriage with anyone or anything or everything is possible when we take responsibility for our voice and the impact of our presence.

I stand up, walk over to the window and raise the blinds to a blue sky and a mockingbird standing defiantly on the gutter of the neighbor’s roof—trilling out a blend of sounds that I hear as a challenge to be unapologetically audible.

What will be your song today?

To whom will you sing it?

Such questions are the foundation of happy marriage.

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Honestly yours,

Rick