![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/84\/2013\/04\/wedding-cake-assembly.jpg\" "\\"wedding")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis month, Libby Anne and Dan Finke are asking bloggers to comment on the purpose of marriage<\/a> as part of their Forward Thinking linkup<\/a>. \u00a0And, in order to try to speak clearly, I\u2019d like to riff off of a recent Modern Love column in the\u00a0Times, where the unmarried author shared his experience officiating a friend\u2019s wedding<\/a>.<\/p>\n Because it was a secular wedding, the officiant and his friends had a lot of flexibility with the\u00a0how<\/em> of the ceremony, but the author of the essay seemed to be frighteningly at sea with regard to the\u00a0what<\/em> of what he was doing. \u00a0He wrote:<\/p>\n There are two sentiments against marriage you\u2019ll hear from certain 20-something wanderers like me. Either marriage is too serious a proposition for them or they are too cynical about marriage to take it seriously. Either they are afraid of how marriage will limit their options or they think you would be a fool to believe that marriage limits anyone\u2019s options, so why bother?<\/p>\n These are contradictory arguments, and yet I find myself susceptible to both. When it came time to prepare my remarks, I wondered how disingenuous it would be for me to harbor such ambivalence and still get up to sermonize\u2026<\/p>\n In marriage sermons, discussing Bible passages is a convention of the form, one unavailable to me. Because I wanted to anchor the proceeding in something more credible than myself, I told the story of the origin of love that Aristophanes gives in Plato\u2019s \u201cSymposium,\u201d which claims that human beings were once powerful eight-limbed creatures until Zeus split us in two for daring to storm heaven, thus dooming us to forever search for our other half in order to be whole.<\/p>\n A bit of a cheat, because it\u2019s a story about love and not necessarily about marriage. And it played well, though I avoided eye contact with the very Christian and newly divorced father of the groom while transforming his son\u2019s wedding into a quasi-pagan ritual.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I love the\u00a0Symposium<\/em> as much as anyone (and if you\u2019re not\u00a0familiar\u00a0with the myth referenced, you should watch this musical summary of it from\u00a0Hedwig and the Angry Inch<\/em><\/a>), but I was left in suspense by the question the author raised but did not answer. \u00a0If a story about love isn\u2019t necessarily a story about marriage, what remains to be added?<\/p>\n I tend to think that there\u2019s a difference \u00a0between love as something you\u00a0feel<\/em> and love as something you\u00a0do<\/em>, and marriage is the unique act of making an unrelated person part of our family. \u00a0The author of the\u00a0Times<\/em> piece thought that, if someone said \u201cMarriage limits your options\u201d the two most plausible responses were to say \u201cNot really\u201d or to run. \u00a0My response is more \u201cYes, and isn\u2019t that wonderful?\u201d<\/p>\n You\u2019re choosing to let the love-you-do trump the love-you-feel from now on, because you want to care about this person and will their good, even if, in the moment, you don\u2019t have a surge of emotions to spur you on. \u00a0Or, to quote Fosca: \u201cLoving you is not a choice, it\u2019s who I am.\u201d \u00a0You\u2019re placing the\u00a0possibility\u00a0of abandoning this person out of the sphere of your possible actions<\/a>, just like flying.<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019s what I mean to do, if I ever get the opportunity, anyway. \u00a0Even after rereading the Modern Love piece a few times, I\u2019m still not sure what that couple or their friend think they were doing. \u00a0As the essayist writes:<\/p>\n Weeks later I was wondering whether Kate and John felt more officially like an eight-limbed monster. He and I met to play basketball, and I asked him how marriage felt.<\/p>\n \u201cAbout the same,\u201d he said. \u201cI get to call her my wife. That\u2019s cool. It\u2019s a more accurate description of the situation anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n I walked home that day, cold because I was underdressed, thinking that what John said appealed to me: marriage as a public admission of circumstances, as correct labeling, because the future will be uncertain regardless, and organizing in preparation has to be O.K.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I like the idea that marriage is the recognition of something that has already happened (I would say it\u2019s an amen to and a sealing of a bond, not its creation), but what, exactly we\u2019re recognizing shouldn\u2019t really be left unspoken. \u00a0When people lived in smaller, more unified communities, marriage was more of a Schelling point<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 everyone could be a little more confident that they shared the same basic idea of the institution (whether or not that idea was good).<\/p>\n But our age isn\u2019t just multicultural. \u00a0For a lot of people, it\u2019s deracinated. \u00a0We\u2019re not rejecting\/reacting against a\u00a0specific<\/em> tradition when we create new ceremonies and rituals. \u00a0That means people may lack a vernacular or system of shared references, which makes it hard have a conversation (including conversations that are critiques of the vernacular you\u2019ve got). \u00a0This is why I tried to sidle up on discussions of marriage by using Sondheim as a jumping off point<\/a> that we could all respond to. \u00a0In this \u201cModern Love\u201d story, the officiant doesn\u2019t seems to have a way to learn from the couple exactly what he should mean when he says \u201cMawwiage\u2026mawwiage is what bwings us together, today.<\/a>\u201c<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This month, Libby Anne and Dan Finke are asking bloggers to comment on the purpose of marriage as part of their Forward Thinking linkup. \u00a0And, in order to try to speak clearly, I\u2019d like to riff off of a recent Modern Love column in the\u00a0Times, where the unmarried author shared his experience officiating a friend\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":7201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-7192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marriage-2","tag-ritual"],"yoast_head":"\n