One of my favorite daily comic strips is Pearls Before Swine. Stephan Pastis does some unusual things with it. Yesterday's strip uses a couple of them: referring to other strips, and going a step further with Bil Keane's trick of treating himself and other cartoonists as characters in his strip (seeing as The Family Circus was about a human family whereas Pastis' is about a group of anthropomorphic animal characters).
Today's strip struck me for a different reason. It provides a typical societal (well, probably more typically male) take on marriage as a lifetime of missed opportunities for more fleeting liaisons. The thing is, this perspective that we sometimes take of marriage being a restriction to our freedom is a great obstacle to a successful and rewarding marriage.
As I commented to Lauren this weekend, life is change. Change makes each moment different from the previous one, and makes each one unique, as well. It is a wonderful gift to us, but, once again, we err in both directions with regard to it. It is in our nature to long for both change and stability, to fetishize change and to fear it. So sometimes we value novelty too highly or, perhaps, recognize it only in certain contexts. At other times we harden ourselves against change, hunkering down in our desire to preserve what we treasure about our past or current situation.
Because I wake up next to the same person every day, I may overlook the newness in her today, lament that she isn't growing in the ways I think she should, or despair because "she isn't the person I married anymore." (Frankly, it's a very good thing for both of us that we're not!) In any of these cases, I fail to recognize the gift I'm given: the opportunity to love my wife for who she is today, which means simultaneously treasuring the sameness in her and discovering the newness in her and loving her in a new way. Over time, this brings a balance of novelty and stability that only a lifelong marital love can provide.
It is easy to seek out and find novelty in a different person, and we have billions of them to encounter, at least in a superficial way. But only in a lifetime of monogamous love can we grow to intimately know another, to fully discover them for who they are and ourselves for who we are in relationship with them (which can be a daunting concept!), to accept them for their strengths and their weaknesses and be accepted for ours. Only the experience of a lifetime of changes together brings this closeness, this depth (not the same as intensity!) of love. Yet this intimate knowledge is never complete, for tomorrow we will both be different and have new things to discover in one another.
I'm excited to make new friends and have new experiences along my life's way. It's a treasure beyond telling. But I'm not going to be succumbing to Timmy Swan's premise that it's a good thing to mate with another bird every now and then.
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