On Practicing
Marital Hygiene
I do not want to become an excellent spouse simply to please my wife, but for my own benefit and pleasure as well. Becoming excellently married finds me in the realm of a dangerous vitality, where marriage begins to realize its deeper and more personal psychological purpose. It allows an exhilarating occupation of the relationship, and places discipline and control where it belongs: upon myself. I want to excel in my relationships the way an athlete wants to excel at his sport, or an artist at his craft: not by going against the rules, but by observing them in creative and strenuous ways, being challenged by them to arrive at the experience of a personal best.
Goethe once wrote: "In marriage, we are to be the custodians of one another's solitude." This remarkable statement contains two words that require closer examination. Custody comes to us from the Latin custodia: keeper, the Greek keuthein: to hide, and the Sanskrit kuharam: a hole in which things are hidden. A custodian therefore is a person who is responsible for the care, protection, guardianship and maintenance of something in particular.
Solitude is easily confused with the loneliness of being remote. While it does have to do with isolation and seclusion, it has more to do with becoming whole enough to take a healthy part in a greater whole. The Latin term solus-- from which we also have the words isolate, solo, and soliloquy-- is akin to the Greek term holos, meaning whole, complete, and entire. I suspect as well correlation with our word soul.
I have come to regard the confrontation of one with another as an opportunity for collaboration as much as for competition. A great deal depends upon a mutually respectful discussion of diverging points of view. We have two hands, a right hand and a left-- and most of us are either right handed or left handed. Integration does not depend upon becoming truly ambidextrous, but rather an ability to use both hands effectively, the way a pianist plays bass and treble notes, or a carpenter steadies a board with one hand while he cuts and hammers with the other.
I have two eyes, and each sees something different, has a different point of view. There is purpose in this: by means of their accord I can find depth. Every relationship that we bring into our lives provides this opportunity to find depth in our lives, as long as we do not try to make the other person adopt our position and reject their own. I believe this is the personal purpose for entering relationships, and-- in the most intimate and telluric of relationships-- for falling in love. Through our lover we seek to fill the emptiness that we sense within ourselves, and to flesh out the flatness of our vision.
The problems we experience in our relationships are not with the issues that we want resolved. Frustration with one another about the fact that these issues cannot be resolved contributes to the real problem: the gradual erosion of the infrastructure of the relationship. Just as we may not notice the condition of the roads upon which we depend when traveling, it is easy to overlook the support system that provides a working collaboration: respect and courtesy, empathy and insight, and loyalty to a common vision. And here I emphasize: loyalty to this common vision is not to its surface detail-- which must differ-- but to the significance of its depth.
Though the garden of your marriage may seem neglected and become choked with weeds, and though you may despair of knowing just where to begin, still, you must begin. Somehow, somewhere, you must start to work together to rebuild the habits of a marital hygiene that will gradually restore the infrastructure you need to deal with the issues that trouble you. At one time you may have wanted these issues resolved and put behind you, but at that time you believed the only solution lay in the other person simply seeing things your way. Now you begin to understand that the differences you discover in addressing these issues ought never be resolved, but lived instead.
How is marital hygiene practiced? --as with any hygiene, with daily discipline. Each small gesture of affection acknowledges gratitude for the companionship of someone who cares, and every subtle glance bears witness to the vision of one another's perfect, yearning search for completion and perfection, within themselves, and in the presence of one another.
---------------
This article previously appeared in The Listener: volume three, issue two (Summer 1998).