A Pageant, With Banners and Spears..

Taking it all in..

I’ve checked with other, old-guy friends.  This is a thing: when we see a young couple wending their way through life, (in my case, “memory-building” moments of family celebration), we get a little emotional, watching a young mom introducing her child to chickens for the first time, or an apple on a tree, or watching dad give his three year old a first taste of tangy, real cider.  When you reach this end of life, and you watch your own children plunge into parenthood, you have a seasoned, bittersweet sense of the realities they will face.  Joy and pain, laughter and weeping, loyalty and betrayal.  As Tevye put it, “one season following the other, laden with happiness and tears.”

Someone once told me that “Jews are happy, because they don’t expect good news.  They are surprised by it, and grateful when it comes along.”

I don’t think we should plan on being unhappy, but I’ve seen too many young couples who expect the bliss of first-encounter to last forever.  Two people forging a life — effectively melting into each other — is not easy.  There are credit cards to be abused and underwear left out on the floor and mother-in-laws with different parenting styles — big, jagged behavioral rocks that need to be removed or polished.  I remember debating an evening’s routine with another young couple when Mary and I were first married.  My college friend wanted to attend a street festival, and his young bride immediately objected — “junk food and cheap souvenirs in a very iffy part of town?  Are you serious?”   My friend looked absolutely broken.  His bride not only objected to his idea.  She ridiculed it for the whole room.

These two — I’m happy to report — made it.  They learned how to live with their own negatives, sand off the rough edges, and turn them into positives.

But a lot of people expect life to be a kind of pleasure parade.  The very first hint that an evening isn’t as magic as that first date, or a career crisis isn’t as pleasant as that first job interview, and they look for the exits.  These days, there is even a trend in therapy advocating “distance.”  Your parents have different political or cultural values?  Get out of their presence, and take the grandkids along with you.  Your husband isn’t giving you exclusive attention, over his friends and family?  Lay down the law, and let him know you’ll leave if he doesn’t obey promptly.

If anything makes the father of darkness happy, it’s both human conflict and the willingness to turn that conflict into permanent separation.  The devil adores division and he can’t stand any marriage, any extended family, any community that will lock arms, forgive each other, and remain united.  You could say that the federal governments lavish investment in welfare benefits represents an enticement for women to end their marriages:  why do you need a man?  Uncle Sam will take care of you.  The people who live off federal taxes absolutely love the whole “divide and conquer” thing.

The miracle of America, and the founding fathers’ creation of a system that forged unity via a separation of powers, is that they knew we wouldn’t be angels.  They knew the horizon would be full of conflict, full of competing interests, and full of corrupt politicians who would seize ALL of the power if they could.  The framers didn’t just anticipate evil.  They planned for it.

I wonder if we still do, really?

The last few generations have been too dumb and too happy and too optimistic.   I can’t tell you how many young, silly brides I’ve seen over the years who simply assumed their husbands would know how to live with a woman, how to anticipate her needs.  Likewise, I know a lot of idiot grooms who weren’t quite prepared for both the nagging, and the reason for it.  Oddly, I think a lot of men these days never quite planned for that day in a marriage when they would have to be leader in their home, that moment when they would have to risk her unhappiness — because, hey, something is wrong if we’re NOT happy, right??

An odd truth here: the happiest people are not the folks who expect happiness.  The content, peaceful people are the ones who expect conflict, the ones who expect there will be some shouting, some criticism, some unpleasantness.  The happiest people hurt, and get hurt, but they know how to forgive, and and how to heal.

Categorised in: Culture

This post was written by Jim Riley