'Til Death

Until lately, I never realized how much I am affected by "divorce culture" for lack of a better term.  My parents, grandparents, and stories of great-grandparents have a history of loving or at least constant marriages.  A few months ago I repeated that fateful line "til death do we part," the same line that I have heard so often, believing and trusting, and rarely actually see in the wider world that surrounds me and my marriage.

It's not that everyone I know is divorced--quite the opposite in fact.  But I know very few who are not in some way affected.
For the sake of my particular discussion, let's say that this pervasive presence of divorce comes from a cultural "attitude" that only seems to be growing.  I have spent my whole life hearing divorce, and even this attitude, preached against from the pulpit.  However, I rarely noticed the implications of this "attitude" in even my own thinking until my own recent vows.  I have watched my friends and family members pledge their lives to another for a number of years, but I don't remember hearing one of them utter a word about a vague and creeping sense of voluntary entrapment that I occasionally struggled (and still fight) with.

Please don't misunderstand me.  I would not part with my Ben for all the chocolate and coffee in the world, or even for a paying job.  But there is a mentality of flippancy that has secret power to inundate even the most moral lives and marriages (which I certainly do not claim for myself) unless we are intentional about noticing its impact.

Recently I have come across some powerful and touching articles.  One described a military widow who requested to sleep next to her husband's coffin for one last night rather than leave him truly alone.  Another was the story of a couple in their 80s who died holding hands in a hospital and were buried in a custom-built double-coffin, not even to be parted by death.  Yet another essay described a man who wrote a letter of faithfulness to his wife, dead two years. 

The problem: these articles are tweeted and shared on facebook maybe because they are encouraging but also because they are anomalies.  Today's "norm" is not life-long love and commitment beyond death.  Today's "til death do we part" seems to be until the roses die and one can afford another dress.

Yes, I exaggerate.  But I recently read another article about a man's life that mentioned his marriages in passing.  This article's main focus was his success as a published writer late in life, but his background of lauded artistic dissatisfaction included two marriages that each lasted less than one year.  Still being in what is probably considered the "honeymoon phase" myself, I might have found these short marriages incomprehensible if not for the cold and trivial statements as historic fact.

But if you have continued with me this far, we are probably both finding that I digress.  I believe I was saying that this attitude of divorce has affected my view of my own marriage on a surprising and disturbing level.  It seems that when I allow my thoughts to dwell too closely on the thought of "life" rather than "tomorrow" in terms of marriage, I sometimes find the deeper and usually repressed recesses of my mind paralyzed by fear.  I find that I am not left unscarred by a culture that says to date, love, and marry only one man is the exception and not the rule.  When I imagine "til death" my mind hits a mental wall and my thoughts scuttle back to the leftovers in the freezer or who needs the car tomorrow.  I admittedly struggle to imagine my marriage in old age, or even with children.  I can usually manage to envision our next move, and I can almost make it to thinking of married and in grad school, but to think in two unbroken lines braided together for years upon years is beyond my powers of cognizance.

But don't think, please, that I am dissatisfied or even lack an encouraging stability in the future of my marriage and my love.  It is something I have heard often and is one of those truths that is dismissed until it is lived: take marriage, like everything else, one week, one day, one hour at a time.  "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of it's own" (Matt. 6:34).

So break out those leftovers and make sure there's enough for two.  Finish that grocery list for your next week of sustenance.  Order next month's Netflix.  Look for that next apartment.  Buy furniture.  Take a walk and talk about your life for the next 24 hours because until death do we part, tomorrow together is what we can count on.