Love Is a Journey … Not a Destination by Rev. Robert L. Schaibly Artwork by Teodoro Estrada

Marriage suits me. I like continuity, warmth, living with someone I love, and having a safe setting for self-expression. But I do not happen to think marriage is for everyone. Me–I’m pro-choice! If you have chosen not to partner, I respect that and I applaud self-knowledge.

In the book Here Lies My Heart, the feminist Vivian Gornick acknowledges a polemic she wrote called "Against Marriage." Subsequently for many years she found herself very lonely. Then she was teaching in a university town and had an opportunity to share a house with "a woman my own age, divorced with grown children away at school. I thought her a sympathetic soul and decided after years of living alone, to chance it. We conducted our lives independently, yet were always delighted to spend an evening at home together. Conversation was an ever-deepening pleasure between us, but neither of us ever made the other feel guilty for wanting to be alone. The relationship was simplicity itself. What took me by surprise was the relief I felt at not living alone. I wasn’t with a lover or even an intimate friend. I was simply sharing a house with a compatible person. It was the absence of gross loneliness that was having an extraordinary effect on me. I felt calm every day and all through the day. I looked around then at my life, and I saw that I had not learned to live alone at all. What I had learned to do was strategize; lie down until the pain passed; evade; get by. I wasn’t drowning, but I wasn’t swimming either. I was floating on my back, far from shore, waiting to be saved."

The reasons we marry are many. Amy Bloom writes, "We marry to find safe harbor in a roaring sea. We marry to avoid gray loneliness in a small room with only a hot plate and a thin cat." She goes on to talk about divorce: "We divorce to find ourselves, and free ourselves of the self-defeating templates of childhood misery." And then she presents her insight: "The chasm that separates us from a partner terrifies us; the prospect of intimacy does, too." We want to be close, but we are often talking about things that are not really the most important thing we have to say to one another.

We may be attracted by what the other person sees in us. For instance, Lynn Darling said, "I married the man I married because I liked his version of myself better than my own. I felt more real with him than I had ever felt with anyone else. I was pleased by the person I saw reflected in his eyes." Listening to her, it seems that he had a vision of her she preferred to her own understanding of herself as a more complete more fully known person. What is interesting is that everyone knows marriage means choosing one other, but maybe it also means choosing one’s self or at least the direction I will develop myself, the role I’ll choose. This is who I will be; I’ll try to live up to this image he has of me.

But of course we are more than that one image, and what we are, all that we are, will be unveiled as time passes and will surprise and delight our partners, right? Uh, huh. Some say we are never to be fully known.

Barbara Ehrenreich counsels reducing our expectations of marriage partners, and tolerating shortcomings. She lists the roles people expect their partners to fill: co-provider and a reliable financial partner. Co-conversationalist and sparkling dinner companion, fully briefed by CNN. A skilled co-parent with a repertoire of bedtime stories. A fitness partner. Handyman or woman. A tireless and imaginative lover. "It doesn’t make sense. Only in marriage do we kiss common sense goodbye and expect that every single human need can be met by a single all-too-human being…. It’s time to cut the spouse some slack and put more of our demands on the rest of the human environment, in other words to rebuild the ancient and honorable notion of community."

In my home, because of our unusual lives, I cannot make the time and do not have the interest in theater-going my partner Steven has. He sometimes goes to the theater with Doris. He had no interest in going to Japan, and so I thought that was that, I could forget Japan in this lifetime. But then I realized, no, I really want to go to Japan, and this was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and so I went by myself.

I might say a word here to the widowed and all who think they will never again live with another. Although we think no opportunity will again present itself, we may be surprised and amused. Author Mark Doty, who currently teaches at the University of Houston, wrote about his 12-year relationship with Wally, who died of AIDS. Mark has since partnered with Paul, a man both he and Wally had known for several years. Though the first relationship was fine, "there are those pleasures that belong to the new relationship. Paul and I love lots of the same books, admire many of the same artists, share passions that Wally and I did not. I’ve thought, ‘Oh, I’m enjoying something with Paul that Wally couldn’t enjoy.’ I’ve wondered, guiltily, if I liked my new relationship better. Which would be a betrayal, wouldn’t it?" No, Mark.

Mark Doty goes on to talk about that domestic pleasure of just being. I have often had a similar sensation, just knowing one I love is elsewhere in the house and I am doing my project and the other is engaged in his own activity. Mark Doty writes about his lover, Paul, who composes music. "He doesn’t know that I have come into the next room. My lover has that concentration, that absorption in the moment, in which it’s impossible not to see his handsomeness, his presence as himself, both self-forgetful and completely involved. As the tune continues our dog leans back, as if the song were entering him, and then begins to roll on his back. So much pleasure in this constellation of things: warmth and sun and the sweet configuration of voice and music. Soon Paul will notice that I am here, watching, and though he’ll be happy to see me, it’ll break the moment’s domestic spell, this little bright instance of what I love, which I am grateful now to stand and watch, unseen."

Rev. Robert Schaibly first presented a longer version of this article as a sermon on July 11, 1999, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston. (You can see the original on their website at www.firstuu.org.) Rev. Schaibly has been senior minister at First Unitarian for 19 years. A graduate of Michigan State University and Harvard, he has studied psychology and Zen Buddhism extensively. Ten years ago he and his partner, Steven Storla, a college English teacher, were joined in a commitment ceremony at First Unitarian.