There are, you may be surprised to read this Sunday, more important things than constitutions, the results of elections, the making and unmaking of presidents and the first steps, and missteps, of a brand new government. For instance:
What relationship between human beings is the most complex, deep, intense? Passionate love between man and woman is surely a contender. For such love, besotted men and women regularly surrender fame and fortune, comforts and distinctions, and sometimes even life itself.
The tragic passion of Abelard and Heloise nine centuries ago astonishes and moves us still. Such love, it seems, has turned the course of history. Troy would not have burned but for such passion. Imperial Rome would have taken quite another direction had it not been for the mad infatuation of Anthony and his Egyptian queen.
Perhaps deeper, more elemental, even than such passionate attachment is the parent-child relationship. What a mother, in particular, feels for her child predates reason and all ethics. It is encoded deeper than any scientist, philosopher or poet has ever exclaimed.
And yet of all human bonds the most variable, volatile, and unclassifiable is the marriage bond.
The relationship which grows between a man and a woman, in a marriage is infinitely complex, mysterious in the extreme, subject to breakdown for a thousand reasons, yet immeasurably durable if the right, indefinable formula is found.
You can generally recognize a good marriage, but it is hard to tie down the details. Generally it is made up of quiet, contented days succeeding one another for all the time allowed. But it need not be so.
A good marriage can last through tempests. Consider the marriage of the playwright Enid Bagnold and Sir Roderick Jones, one-time chief of Reuters: it was a continual tumult, each had several liaisons, yet they both considered their marriage the greatest possible success. On their 25th anniversary she wrote: “Oh, my beloved companion…. What fun we have had…I couldn’t live without you.” Behind the curtains of their life were “the entrancing gossip of bedroom life, the crackles of spirited annoyance, the candlelight battleground, the truces, the fun, the rage, the love.”
Still, that is unusual. A quiet, daily contentment is at the heart of most good marriages. As Nietzsche wrote, it is not the lack of love, but lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. Even the most passionate romances must evolve into friendship. And then you have a wonder of the world. A strong friendship within marriage is the most resilient, longest lasting relationship on earth. Weaknesses in both are understood, held always in perspective and forgiven. Strengths are shared and praised and therefore reinforced. Life’s blessings counted day by day and shared are magnified, its burdens shared are lightened. Life’s humour and its joys are never forgotten. “No ill or wrong will overmaster this.” It is not easy to explain, though in my parents I saw it all my life growing up.
For them it lasted 70 years from first courting to the first death. It was love and companionship, but it was something more – a complete tolerance, affection, understanding, generosity towards one another.
I always felt they had a foundation from which they could cope with anything – sickness, hardship, tragedy, and turn and turn about in a world of ruthless change. And to understand that, and to find it in turn myself I know is one of the best things in life.
Lord Longford, on his and Lady Longford’s 60th wedding anniversary, was asked an obvious question and answered: “I never think about our marriage at all. It is rather like asking how I manage to breathe,” Yes, it is something fundamental, something basically life-giving, like that. Those involved scarcely notice the steady strengthening of loyalty and love. Eavan Boland has a beautiful poem ‘Lines Written for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary’ which ends:
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way,
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbor.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone, We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures.
But no description or explanation can easily capture the essence. I suppose one must start with what Rainer Maria Rilke said about love – that it is a greeting between two solitudes.
And then gradually, beyond greeting, beyond touching, those individual solitudes become one state that is solitude no longer and never will be again.
In such a state those voices that tell all men, all women, that each of us is now, and forever, alone – such voices seem merely perplexing because they do not tell the truth.
Such a relationship transcends so much that is small and lonely in man. It has good claim to be the human bond which leaves us less abandoned in the universe than any other except, believers say, the bond with God.
