How to Get Married

ntinuously guilty.

The audience

We are all broken.

We have all been idiots and will be idiots again. We are all difficult to live with: we sulk and get angry, blame others for things that are our own responsibility, have strange obsessions and fail to compromise.

We are here to try to make you less lonely with your failings. We will mostly never know the details. But we understand.

We understand.

There is nothing odd about this couple beyond the ordinary oddness that is everyone’s lot. They have merely put into words the errors and failings of which we are all continuously guilty.

­ector

Do you admit that you can be an extraordinary challenge; that you can be deeply difficult?

Do you admit that you are a failed, broken
human being – not in every way, but in some ways so serious that you will at points be a grave burden to … ?

There will be troubled times ahead when their own wisdom will fall prey to passion and to error. Our presence is designed to give them the love and the courage required for them to live up to their highest selves.

Love is not simply a feeling. It is a set of skills, including the skill of keeping in mind that our partner’s most upsetting characteristics are rooted in their past sufferings and that they are expressions of hurt rather than indifference or
viciousness. Love is the skill to forgive the wrongs done to us and the refusal to hoard them up as debts for eventual repayment. Love is the skill of seeing clearly our own flaws and failings – and hence of recognising, with gratitude, the generosity our partner daily displays in remaining beside us. It is the skill of understanding that everyone is deeply imperfect and of recognising, therefore, that we are meeting in our partner the faults of human nature, rather than the exceptional failings of one person.

This gives due recognition to an important fact about marriage: it is a social institution, in which we often stay for reasons that go far beyond our own emotional desires. It involves us, but it’s not just about us. It is about the dog, the children, the grandparents, the friends who got married in imitation of us and whose own relationships would suffer if we split.

. But it is inevitable that any partner who truly cares for us will want us to be a little different from the way we are. We should good-naturedly accept the role of learning – and teaching.

Clause 6: I am ready to learn and to teach

We’re ready for marriage when we accept the dignity of the ironing board or of the trip to the supermarket: when we have in our sights a realistic idea of how central administration and domestic management are actually going to be – and when we see that this isn’t a failure of love, just the natural consequence of the success of love.