Marriage is not for children. I have found this wise and solemn counsel, given to me during my courtship, most pertinent and not a little true.
There are countless reasons for this and one of them is the inveterate selfishness that exempts none of the progeny of Adam. This includes those who may imagine themselves a rare exception to this rule. In fact, the risk of unwittingly succumbing to its specious charms is particularly pronounced for them, given their ignorance of its dark workings in them.
Some of may have a stronger grasp of this reality, but even that is not good enough to deliver from its sinister powers. I for one have found this to be among my primary difficulties.
Marriage augments this problem largely out of our ignorance of the human condition, including our own. We enter this most hallowed of institutions believing that, at last, we have found decisive if not final rest from the perennial existential ache of being born, raised and located in an imperfect world, with all its individuated distresses. Finally, we hope, we will so unreservedly love and be loved as to forever banish the primordial loneliness that assails us from birth, into the sea of forgetfulness.
The realisation that this person, the erstwhile embodiment of our earthly hopes, is in fact hopelessly incapable of satisfying this eternal ache, is enough to plunge us into a state of disconsolate despair. To the marginally more enlightened, the despair stems from two places: the jarring realisation that not only will they never receive this type of love from their spouse but that they themselves are in reality hopelessly incapable of giving the same!
Having come to this devastating pivot, many despair of the entire enterprise and flee to the brimming divorce courts, with hopes of making a timeous midcourse correction. With the eternal hopefulness of the human heart being the way it is, out they go with glee into the world of the newly single, only to begin the dismal cycle all over again. Some three and four, others even as much as five times and more!
The selfish conception of love as defined by the world in which we are born, that we must all painfully unlearn, predictably places self at the centre of its universe. I must be loved, I deserve to be happy etc. Whereas the portrait of the purest version can be found eternally inscribed on a lonely cross. Where the person most deserving to be loved ever to live, suffered humiliating rejection whilst demonstrating love in its truest essence: giving His life for a broken, helpless and undeserving beloved to the point of death and beyond. According to this antithetical narrative, everything about genuine love is demonstrated to always be about the beloved never the lover.
Those born of woman find this logic not only completely foreign, but the ultimate offence, because it spells the dreaded denial of self. But with that death follows a resurrection that is simply inconceivable, except to the eye of faith. For the believing are ever aware of the towering silhouette of their Saviour, who says:
“I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains [just one grain; it never becomes more but lives] by itself alone. But if it dies, it produces many others and yields a rich harvest.” John 12:24
