Marriage....dead or alive????!!!!

Marriage

Post-lockdown I was asked by a couple in their 30s to perform the role of celebrant at their destination wedding. Does love offset carbon I wondered? I accepted and yet I felt strangely perturbed. The bride told me I should make jokes to make sure she didn't cry. However she found my jokes to rude or off colour and so I was in the predicament where I had to make jokes which were not funny. But joking aside did I have anything to say about the nature of marriage as a psychological arrangement?
How could I hint at the profound decision they were making, this gamble, this entry into an unknown period of life? In previous eras we needed to be married for the purposes of sex or property or religion. Nowadays none of that applies. Furthermore we used to die at the tender age of 40 or 50. Nowadays we live until we are 100. Surely it must be crazy to get married? As soon as you find out who you've really married the projections were off no doubt they will change again. You really don't know what you're getting in to. And there is no end in sight. Isn't this really a form of extended psychological torture?
Given I was in Spain I looked up some appropriate sayings about marriage. I found, “getting married is like buying melons you have to be lucky.” I guess this alludes to the fact that a melon can look attractive smell fragrant and pass every other test and yet the moment of truth only comes when we get home slice it open and taste it. Is it sweet and fragrant or rotten on the inside? We cannot tell simply by appearance. Fruit shopping just like marriage is a gamble.
I decided not to use this Spanish phrase but it reminded me of a Hindi saying which had stayed with me from decades ago. It goes “marriage is like a sweet made of pebbles, if you eat it you will regret it and if you don't eat it you will pine after it.”
In modern day culture where magazines are full of advice about how to have more sex communicate better maximise your potential live your best life marriage is an anomaly. Sure it looks sweet from the outside but as soon as you put your teeth into it not so much gives you a sugar-kick but jaw-ache. It's not something that can be easily digested we might say.
Another strange thing about marriage is that who we might call disasters of marriage are sometimes more bonded together than masters of marriage. Couples who appear to be in some ill-fated doom spiral often stay the course. Perhaps they have more to work out over their lifetime! Or perhaps they realise that marriage is really a process of mutual confrontation until death. And the more you can bring to the party in terms of that confrontation the more interesting painful an yet ultimately satisfying it may be.
Of course I knew my brief and my speech dwelled heavily on love and the joys of marital union. I really didn't want to expose them to the more tragic aspects of marriage! And yet as I spoke I was able to mention mount Teide which stood behind me. I knew this volcano was active and also overdue an explosion. When it does explode there is no escape; the north of Tenerife would simply collapse into the sea the bracing waters of the Atlantic will give little respite. It made me think also in marriage there are aspects of ourselves which cannot be escaped and have to be faced. There is no running away. At some point a psychological tsunami will come whether it is called or not.
I might say that marriage is an intricate dance which involves all thoughts of forms of mutual projection and fantasy; it may also involve the dissolving of some of those projections as we come to be known by another more deeply and in doing so we come to know ourselves.
I didn’t say all that. No doubt I recycled something more well-trodden to imbue them with hope. I noted how the marriage takes form in front of our very eyes through a foilorm of mutual witnessing. The assembled guests heard them express their love for one another. The volcano remained peaceful and the sea was calm. The only hint of turbulence were the noisy oil powered lawn mowers from the adjacent golf course.
In thinking about the psychological arrangement of marriage my favourite book is a rather out of print and out-dated obscure book, Marriage Dead or Alive, by Adolf Guggenbuhl Craig. You can get hold of a second hand copy for £15; or borrow an online copy for free. I am thinking of giving a copy to the newlyweds but perhaps I’ll wait until the honey moon is over and make sure it is heavily redacted!
I cut and pasted some quotes from the internet (goodreads) below to give you a flavour.

“The marriage of Zeus and Hera can hardly be reframed into a "happy one" and yet Hera is the Goddess of marriage. Hera and Zeus could be described as quarrelsome predecessors of the Holy Family. For the Greeks they symbolized marriage par excellence.”
“Marriage is not comfortable and harmonious. Rather it is a place of individuation where a person rubs up against oneself and against the partner, bumps up against the person in love and in rejection, and in this fashion learns to know oneself, the world, good and evil, the heights and the depths.”
“For us the question is, has the marriage to do with well-being or with salvation? Is it a soteriological institution or a welfare institution?Is marriage, this opus contra natura a path to individuation or a way to well-being?”
“A marriage only works if one opens to exactly that which one would never ask for otherwise. Only through rubbing oneself sore and losing oneself is one able to learn about oneself, God, and the world. Like every soteriological pathway, that of marriage is hard and painful.”
“For those who are gifted for the soteriological pathway of marriage, it, like every such pathway, naturally offers not only trouble, work, and suffering but the deepest kind of existential satisfaction. Dante did not get to Paradiso without going through the Inferno. And so also there seldom exist "happy marriages".”
“The noble images of physician and clergyman are forever accompanied by the shadow figures of quack and false prophet. Now the psychotherapist, the analyst, constitutes the meeting ground, in our day, of the images and the practices of physician and clergyman, of physical and psychic healer. It is thus that he carries a double shadow.”
“Through the act of getting married, one has taken on the task of mutual confrontation until death.”
“Many marriages dry up and miss the path to individuation because the couples try to ease their situations through excluding and representing their most essential characteristics, whether these be peculiar sexual wishes, neurotic traits, or whatever. The more one confronts everything, the more interesting and fruitful becomes the path to individuation.”
“Many of the pains and efforts taken to deal with the contemporary marriage are dominated by considerations of well-being, happiness, and biology. This corresponds to the position of contemporary psychology, which distinguishes itself through a deep skepticism amounting to a rejection of anything transcendent.”
“The central issue in the marriage is not well-being or happiness. It is, as this book has tried to demonstrate, salvation. Marriage involves not only a man and a woman who happily love each other and raise offspring together, but rather two people who are trying to individuate, to find their soul's salvation.”
“We are creatures whose behavior cannot be simply explained as a striving for survival and happiness, for release of tension and contentment.”

“Marriage is one salvation pathway among many, although it contains different possibilities.”

“As soon as we confront concrete marriages with other foreign images-such as well-being, happiness, a home for children-marriage appears to be senseless, withered, moribund, and kept alive largely by a great apparatus of psychologists and marriage counselors. Marriage is dead. Long live marriage!”