Married to a mystery man

It’s not a lack of love that ends long-term relationships, it’s a lack of curiosity, writes Kerry Egan

chaplain, a job in which I spend much of my time listening to dying people’s secrets and revelations. If I had been, I would have known that not one of us ever has all the information when we get married.

The state of being married is coming to the realisation that the person you have pledged your life to is, at heart, a mystery.

There will always be things unknown to you. Usually, these are the things we keep hidden, the secrets we don’t even share with the ones we love most. In the end, as at the beginning, we are mysteries to each other.

The work of chaplaincy dabbles in mystery all the time. The mystery of God, the mystery of death, the mystery of life. What was it all for? What does it all mean? Add love to that list of mysteries. In chaplaincy, a mystery is not something that cannot be known. It’s the opposite. We say God and life and death are mysteries in theological language not because they are unknowable, but because there is so much to know that you can never know the depths of it; there is always more you can learn. They are Mysteries, with a capital M, because they are infinitely knowable. The more you learn, the more you want to know.

That’s really what falling in love is, isn’t it? Yearning to know more about a person, the amazement and delight as each layer is peeled back, the realisation that you can never get enough of the one you love. Perhaps the death knell of love is not anger or even indifference; it’s losing the desire to know more about your partner.

THE UNKNOWABLE

So my marriage was not based on a lie. But like all marriages, it is a mystery. I could not know everything there was to know about Alex the day I married him, and he could not know everything about me.

Neither of us could know what the future held. Neither of us could know, in that little red rental car, that I would have a baby two years later in Iowa where we lived, far away from the town where we married.

We couldn’t know that I would develop drug-induced psychotic disorder from anaesthesia during that birth. Couldn’t know that a psychiatrist would tell Alex that I would be disabled for the rest of my life from psychosis and that we would move back across the country to be closer to my family. Certainly could not have known that with the right help, I would get better in that new town of green hills and stone walls on Buzzards Bay, and that I would find a calling to work with the dying there.

Why, then, would any of us leap into marriage, knowing that the future is unknowable, knowing our spouse is a mystery we can never fully understand?

I suppose it’s faith. Belief that there is something deeply good in the mysterious heart of the infinitely knowable other. And hope that this goodness will be enough to face the future together. Sometimes that works out; sometimes it does not.

In the end, Alex didn’t go to jail for his bachelor party escapades. He paid a fine, just as he predicted. He still doesn’t understand why I cried all night the day after we got married.

I still believe there is something deeply good in him. I still don’t understand him at all.