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A marriage needs more than luck to last
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Published: September 4, 2008
My wife, Jane, and I just returned from a three-week River Cruise to Europe. We started in Budapest, Hungary and cruised on the Danube and Rhine rivers through Austria, Germany and The Netherlands, ending in Amsterdam.
While in Budapest, we heard about the Hungarian customs around wedding ceremonies. Broken glass is supposed to convey luck or blessings on the newly married couple. The evening before the actual wedding, friends and family break glass and porcelain and dump it in the yard of the house or apartment where the couple will live. The next morning the engaged couple cleans up the glass together as a sign of future teamwork. Over enthusiastic friends have been known to bring a pick-up truck full of glass to ensure luck on the new relationship, so that it will last a lifetime.
It sounds like a delightful tradition and the colorful broken glass has much glitter and charm. However, it seems to me that a marriage needs more than luck to make it last. Marriage itself is not for the immature. Someone realistically wrote, "Marriage next to war is the most relentless test of the human spirit."
Adjusting to married life takes more than luck; it takes maturity to make the necessary changes to create two individuals into a "we." As a single person, our time, our money and our decisions belong only to us, as individuals. When we leave the altar, after the marital promises we make to each other, the time, money and decisions begin to affect each other in profound and significant ways.
Even though we love the person we chose to marry, we take on a mammoth task of being responsible to and responsible for each other. When we chose to have children, we take on an awesome task of being responsibility for the health and safety of offspring. A high level of adult maturity, courage and stamina are needed to accomplish the marital tasks that all couples face. Enjoying the highs and weathering the lows together is needed to make marriage work. Luck is great, when it happens, but it is not enough to build a marriage on solid rock. Luck will not maintain a marriage any more than luck will maintain your house or apartment.
If you plant a garden and depend on luck to make it grow into vegetation, without watering it and removing the weeds from it, you will be terribly disappointed.
The myth that marriage is easy is a fantasy we all buy into early on, especially before we marry. That is why so many couples come home from the honeymoon and hit the wall like marathon runners. The faint-hearted drop out of their marriages when they hit the wall of reality. They divorce and drop out of the race. Mature marital runners keep running, keep practicing, keep in shape and do what they need to do to complete the race.
The real key to making marriages work is not broken glass. The real key is keeping your love for each other alive. When you love each other, responsibility becomes a privilege, rather than a task. When you love each other, daily work and childcare is not a burden, it is an honor. To paraphrase an old song, "He ain't heavy, He is my brother," we might say, when we truly love our spouse, "He ain't, heavy, he's my husband" or "She ain't heavy, she's my wife."
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