Marriage
..love, aging and the importance of commitment..
An old friend recently asked me if I was happy within my marriage. Incidentally, I receive this question a lot. I suppose, due to the curious nature of my wife and I’s coming together, her being from a rural Laotian village in Thailand and me being from the curious land currently referred to as The United States, such an inquiry is valid. There is no doubt we are very different from each other. Our mother tongues have virtually nothing in common. The religions we were raised with stem from impressively opposing roots. She likes spicy food. I like sweet. I like to talk a lot. She likes to do. I think with my head, she thinks with her heart and hands. She was raised within a forest, surrounded by family. I was educated in concrete buildings, by people I didn’t know, miles from a home situated in a land I knew nothing about. Every morning before receiving wisdom from elders she offered food and liquid to local spirits, elemental forces, and ancestors. Each day before being indoctrinated into a life of patriotic consumerism I stood with my hand over my heart and pledged allegiance to the flag. Indeed, we come from very different realms.
Yet, throughout my travels I have come to learn that it wasn’t long ago that many peoples of the world placed high importance on marrying out of one’s tribe. When we were more closely related with Land, we knew that if we did not allow seeds to cross-pollinate skillfully with the seeming “other”, than our seeds would eventually atrophy. People, like plants, have similar tendencies. If we remain within our own communities, only hearing the same songs being song over and over, forever hearing the same narratives, grooving to the same rhythms, only eating the same foods and reading the same books, and only kiss people whom look like us, marry our own kind, only pray to our gods, etc. than our world gets smaller, our view narrows and, like plants held in purity for far too long, crucial emotional capacities begin to dissolve.
Yes, marrying someone who holds views so different than mine presents unique challenges. Being from the West, I have come to view things linearly and value structure, planning, direct communication, efficiency, clarity, and the like. And although it would be arrogant for me to suggest that these are not things valued by my wife and our Thai community, the ways in which these things are approached is vastly different there and to an outsider can seem nearly non-existent. Direct communication seems aggressive in most settings my wife calls home. Planning isn’t all that necessary as there is intergenerational intactness that has kept somatic memories alive enough as to make meetings, at least the formal ones we in the west have come to know, a considerable waste of time. Events instead occur spontaneously in rural Thailand, initiated by a collective feeling of what needs to get done. For one whom hasn’t been properly initiated intergenerationaly into a place, with a committed village able to hold them, the social, place-based cues that arise in such a setting will go unnoticed and result in confusion. For people in the modern world, knowing’s like this have nearly atrophied completely. Feelings like this require marriage, not only to another person, but to a place.
We live in a time where we value experiences over commitments. The overwhelming majority of people I know today from the West move regularly. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, from what I can gather, to be nomadic is probably one of the most natural traits of humanness that has been lost by “civilization”. Yet the constant moving enforced by modernity is not nomadism. Nomads are unfathomably connected with the lands through which they pass. We on the other hand move with little to no knowledge of celestial movements, seasonal shiftings, animal migrations, mineral deposits, water patterns, etc. The privileged amongst us move nowadays merely because we feel like it. And generally speaking, we tend to do this with lovers as well.
It is good that people today are free to love however they wish. No one should feel obligated to marry if they are not in love. A man/woman/etc. should absolutely be able to fall in love with another man/woman/etc. if his/her/their heart directs as such. And to remain single, childless, or even celibate should not bring shame. Love is an unpredictable, living, flowing, beautifully complex and uncertain energetic phenomena which, in all seriousness, should have thousands of words, not merely one, to describe her miraculous moving, ever-evolving effervescence. Yet in learning from peoples of the world today whose intactness still shines with fading vestiges of educations and lifeways that grew from a time from whence when we married another person, we first married the Land, there are lessons that still might offer us benefit today.
Nowadays, we don’t stay in a place long enough to learn of the importance of intergenerational relationships with forests, fields, watersheds, and Seed. We take for granted the long ancestral commitments between generations that brought us here, into a time and space where we can freely roam from one city to another, from one lover to the next, as our feelings and personal desires direct. We have all but forgotten in this time of Tinder hook ups and sky-rise apartments the depth of intimacy that was once required of us, with each other and with the Land.
Somehow, I feel I managed to stumble into this world when I met my beloved. When I married my wife, I not only married her, but I married her land, her ancestors, her seeds, stories, and songs. I married the Naga spirits of the Nan River. I married the mango trees and bamboo groves that offered her family life for millennia. And the God that raised me, on the day the village shaman tied our spirits together ritually, became good friends then with Buddha.
Yes, I am happy in my marriage. And as my dear wife turns 40 this week, I reflect over how our individual and shared definitions of “happiness” evolve over time. Whereas once I believed happiness to be that exciting feeling of newness that one finds when first embracing a new lover, or the intense overwhelm and awe of seeing a new landscape for the first time, now it is defined by the ability to speak to my lovers mother in her native tongue and have her understand me, to move gracefully through an extended period of conflict and find repose, to remain in a place long enough to see a tree planted by my partner and I bear fruit. Happiness to me now seems to derive from not only avoiding atrophy of senses but in developing, slowly, over time, entirely new sensorial pathways which allow me to feel more than I could before.
Deep relations are not earned without struggle. And happiness as it was known when we were young eventually ought give way for heightened, more subtle definitions. Learning to live with another is the greatest challenge of all. Allowing others to live with us, to see us, not only when we are fresh, confident, and sexy but when we are broken, confused and afraid is required of us if we are to move beyond modernity’s cult of the individual and regenerate a world based in relationships of belonging. This comes not without sacrifice, requires enormous vulnerability and a commitment to a time beyond now. But the happiness resulting from such a devotional life is far greater than the narrow version of joy briefly experienced when merely avoiding discomfort.
Yesterday, after a particularly long day at work, I stopped by the town park on my way home to see my wife and daughter. I saw the silhouette of my little girl across the way, playing with my wife under a linden tree. As soon as I parked my bike against a pine tree, she saw me! Her little three year old legs ran with all their might with a force of which to her must have felt like thunder. She ran and ran and ran! Her smile as big as the sky. And when she finally arrived close to me, she leapt like a deer into my arms and as I spun her around and around, raising her towards the sun I felt the intensity of my love for her, for my wife, for the trees around us, for the soil here and in Thailand, all churning together in a great soup of merging stories. Love is all there is.
Happy birthday, Ramphai. I have never been happier. I love you…
I Want to take a quick moment to thank those of you who upgraded to a paid subscription this week! It really means a lot to me. It’s been a busy summer here in the high country and it isn’t always easy to find the time to come up with fresh ideas and to craft them in meaningful ways and your generosity nourishes such efforts in a big way. A thousand big hugs your way. I see you and I am deeply appreciative. All blessings!
Song of the week: A Love Supreme. John Coltrane
Happy birthday Ramphai!