The Mystery of Marriage

Last night at counseling we found out that we for certain got the Kirk scheduled for August! Hooray! It was the cause of much rejoicing. Today I went to the Belmonts' house and printed out invitations (during a crazy storm). Then the fiancé and I assembled them and sealed them up for delivery in the near future. I am worried about the fact that they may be defined as "hand-process" materials (thus requiring extra postage) and I can't figure out how to get around the situation. I feel like that sort of thing is more or less up to the postal worker's discretion and would like to find one whose discretion is exactly aligned with my needs. Is that possible?

The invitations look great, regardless, and I hand-delivered two this evening. The very first one went to my roommate Chrissy and then I took another to a going-away party for my colleague Christen who is moving to California. Her soon-to-be address is unknown to me and I wanted to make sure that she is officially, without-a-doubt invited to our wedding. I hope she and her husband will be able to come! (Chrissy has to come for sure since she is scheduled to stand up-front with me in a yellow bridesmaid's dress...)

Tonight at the party for Christen, I realized once again how nerdy I am. My supervisor, Dra. M, and I were nerding out in a corner about something linguistics-related and I looked over to Belmont (somehow expecting him to be on the edge of his seat like I was) and realized that he would rather have been punching himself in the face at that particular moment. I then realized that our topic of conversation probably had a small audience of people to whom it would actually be interesting... but then also realized that I work with every single one of those people and we think that we are interesting all the time! The rest of the world probably does not. (How could one not find code-switching and stereotype-based coding riveting?!) Anyway, I was reminded again of a passage from a book I just started reading. A friend of ours got us The Mystery of Marriage as a shower gift this past Sunday and I can already tell that it is going to become a new favorite. I was already hooked just reading the Prologue, but Chapter One has proved to be just as interesting. Here is what he has to say about otherness (the central theme of the chapter):


"Most marriages are invaded sooner or later by the suspicion that the partners may really have very little in common beyond the simple fact that they are both human beings and that they happen to love each other (or at least thought they did at one time). It can be a very great shock for a couple to discover how quickly romantic love is exhausted, how little they really know or understand one another, how deeply estranged it is possible to become from the person you thought you were closest to. Even a taste of such estrangement can be enough to fill a couple with fear and to plunge them into permanent grief over having made such a 'poor choice' of partner: Why couldn't they have chosen someone with whom they had more natural affinity?

And yet it is this fundamental apartness, this same sense of nothing else in common but human flesh itself and the primal attraction between man and woman, that is the very strength of a marriage, and the experience to which the relationship must constantly return for nourishment. For it is right here that the mystery of love can be best discerned and known. This is the soil in which love thrives, a rich, black, mysterious loam of total darkness in which nothing else will grow. How else can true love be truly known except when it is separated from everything that is like it, from all forms of natural attraction? A marriage lives, paradoxically, upon those almost impossible times when it is perfectly clear to the two partners that nothing else but pure sacrificial love can hold them together.

Of course, it is almost always the case that the couple has much more in common than they may suppose. But marriage seems to specialize, at times, in radically de-emphasizing the similarities between partners and wildly exaggerating the points of difference (especially at the superficial level of personality or temperament). But this is so that a couple may come to know one another at the deepest level..." (Mason, 36-37).


This quote has been something that I have been pondering today. It gives me a hope for our differences which may seem overwhelming to both of us at times. (Belmont can tell you how bored to tears he was tonight, even when he tried to act interested... and I can tell you how I would feel exactly the same way at a business convention in a conversation on golf, which may be riveting to him.) Yet as I read this book, I agree with what Mason says about these being "superficial" differences that in marriage are grown into a deeper understanding (at a deeper level) of the other person. Oh, sanctification. How frustrating you are at times! And yet how necessary.

The real stuff begins in 49 days. Whoa!!