The Huge Life Gamble That Is Marriage

I digress at this moment from the particulars of my parent’s story and ask a very general question: why do people marry?

Why is it that people continue to behave as if true happiness, that forever-and-lasting kind of happiness, will be found within the context of this demanding and engulfing commitment? It’s because despite dire predictions about the “death of the family”, the vast majority of adults do continue to move into marital unions. Most people marry, and most people spend most of their lives (except in their early adult years) living in families. Not only do most people marry, but they marry with the hope of being happy. This might seem to be rather strange and a blind kind of behavior given the evidence of marital misery and marital failures all about them.

Why, given the clear difficulties that can arise, does anyone do it? What is it that is offered to a person that could compensate for the risks involved? I mean, the risks of putting one’s sense of worth, of being needed and necessary, esteemed in this world, into the hands of another?

My question contains much of its own answer. For what marriage can provide, if the risks pay off, is everything mentioned above. The bond provides mutually shared space in the world, a place interdependent security. If my well being depends on my partner’s existence and well-being, then he is necessary to me; if his well-being depends upon my existence and well-being, then I am necessary to him: we are both necessary people. Marriage is, when it operates well, a means with which the couple manages to give each other significance. It provides for the adult what membership in a family once provided for the child: a home ground of the soul, an emotional safe shelter. If it works, it is the best sort of mutual support system, for each partner can bestow upon the other the sense of his or her importance and intrinsic worth. Each one of the pair is, on creation of the marital bond, part of a unit— to which the other part is uniquely and wonderfully necessary.

In the huge gamble in life that is marriage, we put our sense of being “someone significant” into the hands of another — hoping that the person will confirm and validate our worth, even as we do his or hers. The bond thus established creates a clearing in an otherwise frightening and impersonal wilderness. Human love attachments, when they flourish, confer a sense that one’s existence matters.