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'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