To Have and to Hold
Two friends of ours recently had a surprise wedding. They were visiting family over Thanksgiving, and after dinner they told everyone to go out into the yard, then they appeared with a veil and some rings and tied the knot right then and there. And though it seemed spontaneous and a little crazy, it was anything but thoughtless. They were perfectly clear about the promise and commitment they were making to each other. It got me thinking about the promises we make in life, and the courage it takes to make them.
The poet David Whyte wrote a book about those promises called The Three Marriages. By “marriage,” he meant a vow and commitment we make to live and love a certain way and to value certain things, and he identified three broad categories of marriage that we are called to in our lives: one with our work, one with our relationships, and one with ourselves.
The marriage we enter into with our work isn’t always with the work we get paid for. This is the work we are called to. It may be creative work, or community work, or work to understand the world or make it a better place. Like any marriage, this one can involve compromise, and conflict. It isn’t guaranteed to last forever, and it’s almost certain to evolve and change. But also like any marriage, we enter into this one by choice. We strive to bring our whole selves to it, day in and day out, not out of obligation, but out of intention and faith.
The second kind of marriage is relationship. Yes, this includes romantic life partners, but also friends, parents, siblings, children and anyone else you love. It’s the vow we make in advance to forgive, and the request we make to be forgiven. It’s a promise to put connection and caring above all the toxic things that push two people apart: power, shame, self-righteousness and blame. Most of all, it’s a commitment to showing up, to seeing someone else as they really are, and to loving them just the same.
The final marriage is to ourselves. This is often the hardest one. Is there any face we grow more tired of seeing than the one in the mirror? Is there anyone whose mistakes, weaknesses and flaws we know better than our own? And yet, this is the marriage that all the others depend upon. There’s an old African proverb: Beware the shirt that’s offered to you by a naked man. What kind of love do we offer if we can’t love ourselves? What kind of work will we choose when we don’t trust our own choices?
On the one hand, the challenge of a marriage to ourselves is the same as the others. It has to be a choice, and an act of faith. It has to involve forgiveness. It has to endure both because of who we are and in spite of it. But unlike the other marriages, this one does not end, and this one is where everything else begins.
