Chapter 5/5

Marriage

Her family had lived on the border of poverty all her nineteen years. Frequently, they crossed that border. One day, frustrated from being told again there was no money for a movie, she said, “When I get married, I’m going to marry a rich man.”

Her father’s immediate response, “You’d better marry someone you love.”

“Well, it’s as easy to love a rich man as to love a poor man.”

We marry because we believe there is something to be gained: wealth, prestige, acceptance, stability, power, or whatever else we feel is lacking in our life. We believe marriage can fill that need. Most of us, however, unthinkingly hope to marry the handsome fellow or the beautiful girl with an attractive figure.

My wife once said she married me for my beautiful hair, my beautiful eyes, and my intelligent mind. My hair has long since been gone, and we were married less than four years before she had to see my eyes through the lenses of glasses. I hope I don’t lose my mind. We had our first date sixty years ago, and I would hate to lose her after all this time.

Ideally, we marry for that vague thing called love. Often this indefinable experience, falling in love, overrides all other intentions, hopes, and dreams.

Where does thought come into the picture? Is choosing a marital partner to be given deliberate consideration, or would that remove the romance and reduce the relationship to careful calculation? The philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the handful of greatest thinkers in history, was once in love, but he realized there were many considerations to be reflected upon. Choosing the idea of marriage as the thesis of his deliberations, he realized the enormity of antitheses, the tensions they raised, and the possible syntheses they might lead to.

On one hand, we should use all the time we have available to think things through before making serious decisions. On the other hand, there are occasions when our time is limited. Sometimes we must decide now or never. Sometimes it is dangerous to wait. Kant did not realize that a prospective bride might grow impatient. Before he had time to consider all that is—or might be—involved in marriage, he learned that she had given up and married someone else. He never married.

Anyone contemplating marriage in the twenty-first century should give some thought to the odds against successful marriage, at least in the United States. When marriage is on your mind, divorce is the most obvious antithesis. Any clear-thinking person must realize the enormous tensions that can develop between the idea of marriage and the potential for divorce, or between the fact of marriage and the possibility of divorce. Being “in love,” while it might be an essential element of a good marriage, provides little assurance of enduring marital stability. Something to think about.
I’ve said that the Hegelian dialectic can be understood simply as the movement from thesis and antithesis to synthesis. I also said that we would need to look beyond this simple pattern into the complexities Hegel had in mind. According to Hegel, we could take our stance anywhere, thus, even an antithesis could be taken as a thesis of its own. The synthesis always becomes a new thesis. Whatever our original thesis, we will find that it is the antithesis to other theses. Each thesis has multiple antitheses and each thesis/antithesis may lead to any number of potential syntheses.

How might this work out when marriage is being considered? Marriage is going to be the synthesis of a male and a female. Ordinarily, however, little thought is given to the obvious: he will think like a man, she like a woman. And men and women are different. This tension will increase across time, being reconciled only as a succession of syntheses are reached.