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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1986)
M I l K N 'But Why Are You Getting Manied?’ By STEPHEN R. MORRIS W W V hen I told my roommate that I was getting married, 11 § his reaction was, quite simply, stupefied disbelief ■111 Reactions from other friends ran the gamut, from V V "Surely you jest!" to" You are insane!” My wife, Eden, W ¥ encountered the same incredulity and ambivalence wherever she broke the news Apparently, we had hit a nerve. It’s not as if marriages in college are uncommon. Or. at least, unheard of. Indeed, we’re told by parents that college once served uniquely—and almost indispensably—as conjugal cata lyst, providing an ideal setting in which to test the ground of a prospective mating. College still does provide that setting, and college students still marry each other. But judging by first reactions to my marital intentions, even if marriage is not un known to students, it is yet something strange, and more than a little unsettling. It is strange, I think, because most students cannot—often until the very moment of assent to the proposal-even imagine themselves intending to marry; fewer still can think of any good reasons to. It is to many the ultimate irrational act. It is un settling, as well, to people who harbor the suspicion that, irrationality notwithstand ing, there’s something right and’whole about marriage. While violating the strong modern impulse of students to be independ ent, mobile and unencumbered, marriage holds an almost paradoxical appeal to their sense of tradition and continuity. Students resolve this tension by envision ing marriage as an alternative firmly situ ated in the abstract future. In the mean time, when a fellow student is seen actually taking the fateful leap in the all-too-proxi Students can’t even imagine themselves intending to marry mate present, the question is inevitably rawed, But why are you getti ng married?” The implication is that today marriage is just unnecessary (and perhaps, in view of its unsettling effects, unnecessarily provocative)- You can "live together” (in sin, as it used to be so quaintly put) pretty much free of social censure and even, more often than not, of parental disapproval. Living together, it is thought, is an ideal arrangement. It’s sensible and prudent—-it can’t end in divorce. More than that, it affords all the benefits of marriage—the shared dailiness that becomes the foundation of all mature love—with none of itB drawbacks; it’s not drastic and final. United HtkMis: Marriage is drastic and final, or so it appears To a student worrying about job prospects, it is anathema. It limits options and only complicates a postgraduate picture that is already complex enough. It can wait. Of course, a desire to marry someone has a way of circum venting even the most elaborate barriers of resolve against the idea of marrying. Another of reality’s devastating assaults on the abstractions by which we try to make sense of our lives. Perhaps, in the course of a blooming romance or a solid and fulfilling relationship, a notion crosses the mutual minds of a couple that "this is it." What’s an aspiring young career-bound college student to do if that moment suddenly comes? Well, realize first that a desire to marry is not a desire to live together. Thus, is it just an irrational aberration—one of those desires that it is better to let pass lor, if necessary, to resist by all means available!? Maybe not, and most students realize this. There’s a lurking suspicion that marriage is right—in some way most of us aren’t willing, or able, to acknowledge. Msdplae at last: Not right for everyone, of course; but right for those who are inclined to think it’s right for them. For such people marriage is more than the encumbrance, liability and restraining force that it unquestionably is. For such people marriage is wnat daily training is to me casual weekend jogger: the opportunity to develop and cultivate potential. Marriage, for those who would undertake it. fully aware of what they are undertaking, is the discipline of love (as art might be said to be the discipline of imagination). "For a couple," writes American essayist and poet Wendell Berry, "marriage is an entrance into a timeless community." These are heady words. But there is a truth expressed in them. A marriage well prac ticed is timeless in the way that any excel lence is. Well practiced, it replicates a form of human coexistence that is replicated in countless other human contexts. That so many marriages fail, in so many ways, is not a special symptom of our soci ety's moral degeneration. Marriages have always failed—though these failings have not always been registered so commonly as divorces, and they still are not always so registered today. Failure comes in part be cause marriage is a hard discipline and a demanding form. As in poetry, or scholar ship, or athletics, marital excellence is achieved only in me course 01 ume and only oy dint or naro work—work that may not always be worth investing It is this challenge and the real formal beauty of a well practiced marriage that are the sources both of marriage’s un settling appeal to students and of their resistance to the idea of marrying. Excellence is appealing, but the idea of committing so much time to the pursuit of excellence, which might end in failure, is intimidating, at least. Think, after all, how disconso late is the athlete who has trained four long years, yet who fails to win a place on the Olympic team. Was it worth all the pain? I don’t know the answer to that question. My marriage and life are young still. Following the hunch that "this is right" on to a full-bodied commitment to married life is taking a chance. Is it right to take chances? It seems to me that this is part of what it means to be alive. In matters of the heart, and in pursuit of the excellence of old forms, I think we have no choice Stephen H. Morris is a graduate student in philosophy ut the University of Pennsylvania