Marriage ... it’s complicated

Marriage — now there is a topic that, if we all need a little respite or distraction from an impending Trump presidency, must be free from dissension and difficulty. Not!

What is marriage? Ask a 30-something and they will tell you it is about finding happiness and someone to meet their needs. Ask anyone 20plus years into a marriage and they will tell you it is about sacrifice and compromise.

If both mean, ultimately, it is about love, then they are right. Ask a less polite person and they will tell you marriage is like getting into a boxing ring with a 300-pound gorilla. Or, more elegantly, the collision of tectonic plates at the earth’s crust.

When this happens geologically, we get mountains and earthquakes. When it happens in our lives, we get ... fundamental change. There is a lot going on, and colliding, under the surface, that only time will reveal. This includes, in no certain order, what qualifies as a Christmas present, the nature of good parenting and who balances the checkbook.

In the Jewish marriage ceremony, the groom stomps on a wine glass, a gesture to the irrevocable nature of that change. If we stick to our commitment, then marriage will shape us — and, yes, pummel us — into a different person, one better, probably, than if we were left alone.

From a social point of view, marriage also redeems nuclear families from their own histories and disasters, mixes things up a bit and keeps us all honest. Who doesn’t need change and fresh blood? We all do.

Nothing could be more universal in time and culture than marriage and if we enter this century, that includes gay and lesbian people, as it should. Talk honestly across the continents, even millennia, and no one will escape or question the laughter and suffering that is marriage.

So where does that leave the single or divorced people of the world? One answer, of course, is in the enviable position of fully and completely determining their life. Another is outside the safety, music, color and complexity of one of mankind’s best institutions.

And bad marriages? The kind that make season three of “The Walking Dead” look like “Happy Days?” Another institution altogether, one Dante might have written about. If we question our marital status, this is one place we can all agree to avoid.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge began his epic poem “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” with an encounter between an old man and a wedding guest, hurrying to the ceremony. The old man interrupts the temporal and felicitous moment with a tale of fate, suffering and redemption, one wholly outside the joining together of two people.

Or is it? Do we bring even the most important of things — destiny, God, our life’s purpose — to the clasped hands of marriage? Hopefully, yes. Then it gets complicated. But that is what marriage is for.

FILE PHOTO In the United States, marital status is indicated by both husband and wife wearing a wedding ring on their left ring finger.