Bette and I were married in December, 2005. We met in January and were ready to be married in June, but it took as long to assemble the family as to decide to choose each other as lovers and partners. The people we asked to attend the wedding received a letter addressed to "guarantors." I'm thinking of lines 4--33 for this essay. The rest of the letter is made up of short statements of the four principles and I'd like to take them one at a time over the next few months.
The theory was that no one would be invited who did not agree to be a guarantor of the marriage, but it struck quite a few of the invitees as an odd notion and we didn't push it. This post is about why I think it was a good notion, however odd it seemed.
Bette and I agreed early on the kind of marriage we wanted to pursue. There are four essential principles to this notion and by the time I met Bette, I had thought about them for so many years that I could actually say what I meant by them. We both knew that the specific form our pursuit of these goals would take would be defined by who we were for each other and who we could become for each other. So nothing about these principles is a formula that you can fit over two people who want to become a couple and direct their growth. On the other hand, it was clear to me that we wouldn't become that kind of couple if we didn't pursue the goals.
The implications of that pursuit were pretty clear to us, which is good because we were the ones doing the pursuing. It was the question of how it applied to the gurarantors that wasn't so clear. Here are two of the difficulties, as presented by the people who were asked.
1. You want to what? Come on, people don't just do that. What a weird way to make a commitment! Why don't you just start with loving each other and see what happens?
2. You want me to what? Let's see if I get this. You want me to "get" the kind of marriage you two want and to agree to give you the feedback on it that will help your pursuit. You want my active appreciation of the things you do that will help your pursuit and my cogent criticism of the things you do that will lead you in another direction. Right so far? And you want me to agree to do these things entirely apart from the question of whether I, myself, agree with them; based only on the fact that the two of you agree with them?
You can see now why we didn't comb through the list of potential invitees, weeding out those who couldn't come to grips with 1 or 2 above. But maybe you can see, too, why we wanted guarantors and why we needed them.
I've put the objections the way the potential guarantors saw them. Now I'd like to put our desire for guarantors the way we saw them. We wanted a kind of marriage that out culture allows, but doesn't really support. We knew that if only the two of us wanted it and knew what we wanted, we would be working at it alone. It's hard to work at it alone, even when it's all going well; it's really nasty to have to do that work when it's not all going well.
We didn't want to have to choose between "supporters," i.e., people who would help us have the kind of marriage they wanted us to have and "fans," i.e., people who would agree to like whatever Bette and I wound up doing. We wanted people who understood what we were after and who would agree, as friends of the marriage, to say what they thought was helping our efforts and what was hurting them.
It's a lot to ask of a friend. Friends who are perfectly willing to share their opinions, based as they are on their own preferences, are not always willing to share their judgments, based in this case on our preferences. But we couldn't think of a way to ask for less, so that's what we asked for.
Surely it is rare for a couple to go into a marriage--this was a third marriage for each of us--hoping to have just the kind of marriage the culture presupposes and will thoughtlessly support. I hope it is rare. We knew going in that some of the practices--treating compromise as a last resort, for instance--would not be supported by a culture that treats compromises as "the way to resolve differences." But we wanted to do it our way anyway and we wanted friends to help us. To me, it doesn't seem so odd when I put it that way.
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