Good Marriages Don't Just Happen

A funny thing happened during my first year of marriage. I got married again. No, there wasn’t another ceremony, but maybe there should have been.

Eight months after my wedding, I was still second-guessing the future I had chosen. I loved my wife Madonna and felt that I had committed to her. However, things weren’t going well. I missed my “answer to no one” schedule. I missed my self-time and would suggest to Madonna that she could go visit her family and friends more if she wanted. My cleaning and upkeep skills were at kindergarten levels, and I didn’t like being so obviously incompetent. My occasional bad moods were no longer private affairs, but common marital property. I remember saying to myself, “I’m in trouble. I am in big trouble.”

I was waiting for a good marriage to happen to me, and it wasn’t happening. I wasn’t planning on leaving, but I was planning on being unhappy.

Learning to be married as priority one

In retrospect I believe that I was trying to change without changing. Certainly, I had read and heard about the need for commitment and dedication in marriage, but I envisioned it meaning doing the same things I always did, but with more determination. Slowly and with some degree of fear, it dawned on me that I couldn’t fit my marriage into my old set of habits, activities, pastimes, priorities. I had to give the marriage first place and change other things around to suit that.

What our bodies symbolize when we make love, we are called to carry out in reality—become a new creature, one flesh. If the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is a wonderful mystery, so is our marriage: how two beings in love can be enveloped in a Holy Spirit so strong that it is a real creature, a third force, which completes the other two.

Embracing your marriage journey

Clearer in memory than the vows I took on my wedding day is the vow I made to Madonna eight months into my marriage, by myself, praying and struggling in the back room of our apartment: “All right, Madonna, I don’t give up on this marriage, I give over to it. I will be changed by it, without knowing in advance where it will take me.” I accept this marriage again as a “given” in my life. And by that, I mean a “gift,” not “something taken for granted.”

As I let go of my inner reservations, there arrived a sense of joy and gratitude that has stayed with me through all the challenges and re-commitments that 25 years of marriage have brought.

Dispelling the marriage myths

There are two myths about the first year of marriage. One is that it’s all sweetness and light; the other is that it’s hell on earth. They are myths because every marriage is different. Whatever is happening to a particular newly-married couple is no more than raw material, a starting point on which to build the marriage. And you can start from any place.

Reflection questions for your marriage:

• How have my past experiences (divorce in the family, failed relationships), affected my willingness to give a total commitment to my marriage?
• What inner reservations about marriage or about my spouse do I need to let go of?
• How does God and my sense of God’s constant love figure into my marriage?