On Love and Marriage

As many modern lovers do, my husband and I wrote our own wedding vows. Void of the traditional, albeit stuffy “I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband/wife,” we started out on an empowering note. Our vows were heartfelt and sincere. We stood hand-in-hand, trembling as we recited our promises to one another. It was both beautiful and incredibly naïve, as approaching marital bliss generally is. We were over the moon to embark on forever together, but had no idea what was coming down the pipeline for us.

Legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, said “to love without knowing how wounds the person we love.” And so, my husband and I spent the first two years of our marriage wounding each other; sometimes surface abrasions, other times deep wounds were inflicted. We were failing at the thing we entered into with so much zeal and optimism. We were promised to make each other better than we were before, but it seemed we were moving backwards. Failure is a part of being human, after all. Turns out, it’s part of being married, too. It’s part of what being alive means; screwing up. And that’s part of what marriage means; sometimes hating the other person, then, days, weeks, or months later, coming to and loving them again, because that’s the promise you’ve made. The law binds you as a couple, but you have to choose to love one another. Maybe the act of choosing every day to love changes the relationship for the better.

Life is suffering—and yet. There are so many “and yets” in marriage. I love this person and yet he can be a real pain in my ass. Or, I love her and yet she has a hard time considering me. The longer you are with someone, the more “and yets” rack up. But “and yets” work the other way, too. We’ve wounded each other and yet we still love each other, we’re still committed to this crazy thing that is sharing our lives. Through the darkest of times, we love because it’s the only thing that makes sense in this world. Love is our religion. At the heart of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name”—that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. Understanding is what everyone needs, desperately, but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get caught in the smallness of our fixations, or the largeness of ourselves to be able to offer such expansive understanding. That is where we find ourselves being able to lean on our marriage partner for love and understanding of ourselves and each other. Nothing is a better mirror than marriage. You live with yourself, exposed to another in a way that you might not have been able to see before. It is said that love refines, and I believe that’s what that ultimately means; it brings understanding on a deeper level. To be fully known and yet fully loved.