President Kennedy's mother, Rose, once decided that she had had enough of life with her high-rolling, woman chasing husband, Joe, and she walked out on him. She was so hurt and so angry that she took the first three of all those children of destiny still to come, went back to her family home, and told Joe she couldn't stand him anymore and wasn't coming back. Her father welcomed her back to the fold. For a couple of months. And then sent her back to Joe-with thesd words: You've made your commitment, Rosie."
What kind of thing was that to say to a troubled daughter who had gotten desperately unhappy with the way her husband was carrying on with other women? Why did Rose Kennedy have to be reminded of a commitment she had made before she had had a solid notion of the sort of man she was marrying? Because it was a lifetime commitment, her father said, for better or for worse. Rose was obedient. She went back to Joe, lived with him until he died, and became a legendary believer in lifetime commitments.
But why should she, or we, or anybody, for that matter, ever stick himself or herself with a commitment for life when none of us has a ducking's notion of what is in store?
About four million Americans will make lifetime commitments this year. Most of them will expect to keep their commitments; almost half of them will split before fifteen years are over. The figures dismay a lot of us. But, looking at it another way, maybe we should be impressed that half of them will stick with it through the worst and best of times.
Remember that we are talking about commitment to the most fragile, the most threatened, of all human relationships. Can any commitment compare with marriage for the pain it can bring? And haven't many of us been converted to the relaxing proposition that "till death do us part" is a nostalgic leftover from a buried antiquity no one will ever see again? So a fifty-percent survival rate may be something about which to crow.
Does a lifetime commitment to anyone really make sense today? Why not six-month commitment, with an option to renew, or a commitment to a two-year trial? Why should we start out with a promise to make it last forever?
There are, after all, plausible reasons for not making lifetime commitment open-ended, just in case. Here they are, the three of them, condensed.
We Change After We Make Commitments
Sometimes we change a lot, and two married people do not always change in the same ways or at the same pace.
I have grown a lot since we've been married, but Che just hasn't kept up. Now she is holding me back. I know that she has grown at the pace she thinks is right for her. But we cannot grow together anymore; we can only grow apart. So the decent thing for me to do is leave her.
Or turn the page. Che has changed so much I hardly recognized her a the person I married. Back then she really wanted to care for me and the kids, but now she doesn't know her anymore. She certainly isn't the person I promised to love with."
Everyone Has a Right To Repair Mistakes
We all try to cut our losses when we realize we have put our money in the wrong mutual fund. We witch jobs when we have reached a dead end in our career. We change from Baptist to Presbyterian when we find a friendlier church in our neighborhood. We trade in our car when we have a lemon on our hands. So that venerable sociologist Margaret Mead asks in her book Male and Female: "If past mistakes are to be repairable in every other field of human relationships, why should marriage be the exception? Well, why should it?
Everyone Has A Right To Stop Pointless Pain
Nobody on this earth has a right to perfect happiness. But surely we have a right to put a stop to pointless pain. If Pam's putting up with painful stuff from Paul, her angry husband, is not doing either of them any good, and is in fact doing them both a lot of harm, their pain has no purpose. It isn't leading them anywhere as persons, and it is killing their happiness and their marriage. So if Pam cannot get Paul to quit hurting her, it simply isn't fair to expect her to put up with brutal husband just for the sake of her commitment.
So we have three reasons for taking the "fatal forever" out of commitment to marriage.
The chips are down: is it still reasonable to make a lifetime commitment to marriage and to keep it in the face of these plausible arguments for keeping our bags packed, just in case?
I should tell you at this point what lifetime commitment is about. It is not about lenghf of time, not first of all, not basically. I don't, for example, think along this lines, "if I lived for another 20 years, I will have to live Doris for 240 months, or 1,040 weeks. Can I stick with her for that long? I don't think about the calendar when I think about my commitment. Nor do people I know. Not the ones who are committed. It's when we are not committed that we worry about the number of years ahead of us.
Committed people don't hunker down before the terrors and tedium of time to come. In fact, many of us make our commitments by the day. We choose each day to put someone else's needs ahead of our wishes. We chose each day to care for someone.
Then what does the lifetime in commitment mean?
Life times means " unconditional."
A lifetime commentment is about not having exit routes along the was, just in case things don't work out the way we had expected. For instance, a lifetime commitment would never sound like this: "I'll stay with you unless you get stomach cancer. "Or " I'll be with you as long as you remain thin." Or "I'll stick with you until somebody better comes along." A lifetime commitment doesn't have escape clauses in the fine print.
So lifetime commitments are simply commitments intend to keep, no matter what.
Most of us seem to believe that marriage entails this sort of commitment because of the sort of thing marriage is. For instance, we still get married only when we are ready for commitment.
Isn't this why we need ceremonies? Let it be a high sacrament in a sacred chapel or a flat formality in a civil chamber, we want a ceremony of some sort. The reason we need a ceremony is that we want to make vows for everyone to hear, vows to live together until the sharp blade death slices us apart, vows spoken in a festive setting, vows we celebrate afterward with our friends and family.
Someone asked Jane why she and Rick did not get married; after all they had been living together for a couple of years and they seemed to hit it off well.
This was Jane's answer: "We are not sure we are ready to make the commitment. The way things are now, Rick is free to go whenever he wants to go, and so am I, and we want to be able to split without any guilt-soaked fuss about breaking a commitment. When we are ready to make the commitment to each other, we will get married."
Jane senses a difference between a choice to live together for the time being and a commitment to stick together no matter what. So do most people.
But why does it make such sense to us?
The reason must lie with deep human needs that we all share, needs intimately tied to marriage, needs that only a lifetime commitment can meet.
What we need most is TRUST.
There is probably no other person in the world we need to trust so much as we need to trust the person we marry. And nothing creates trust like knowing that the other person is unconditionally committed. Legalities do not help much. Would it help, when we felt specially insecure, if our partner said: "You've got a marriage license, isn't that enough for you?" Would it help if our partner offered us a contract that guaranteed us a fair share of things in the event that he-or-she-should leave us? Not really.
It takes a personal commitment to create TRUST. Not just a vow spoken a year, ten years, a lifetime, ago. But a commitment reborn everyday by our reliable presence, renewed by acts of care, resurrected by generous forgiving. Our commitment to someone in caring love is the only guarantee we can give, the only basis for TRUST.
But why do we need to trust each other so completely?
Let me count some ways. There are probably more, but here are some needs that I sense and I mention them because they seem to be universal.
We Need To Trust Each Other With Our Gift
We need to trust each other so much because we give each other so much. Think of commitment as a gift-the gift of one self to another. Quite a gift! The Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier talks of it this way in his book The meaning of gifts. "The I do' is a gift,"he said, "total, definite, unreserved...a personal and unchangeable commitment." Quite a commitment!
We give a big chunk of ourselves, the most vulnerable part the part that gets hurt badly if it is let down or betrayed. And trust is the way we have of coping with the risk of such extravagant giving.
Maybe the supreme moment, or at least the most sensitive symbol, of giving and trusting is the moment of making love. At least if there is passion in it (which is certainly not always the case). But when we do give love as well as make love, we give a gift that we cannot take back again. And giving it leaves us exposed, open to joy and open to pain. The sadness of being left alone after we have given such a sensitive part of yourself away can be chilling. How we need to trust each other with our gift!
It's something like the way we once trusted our mother. We become like the children we were when we trusted our mother to stay with us, to give us her tender touch and her soothing hum, to come back again whenever she left us, to be with us even when she would rather be somewhere else.
We Need To Trust Someone To Care For Us
We need to trust someone to care for us during the low ebbs, when life's energy bottoms out, and we are too weak, too tired, to take care of ourself. We need to be able to trust another to care for us when we fell down and can't get up by ourselves, when we cry out for help, when we make bad mistakes, when we are afraid. Within us all beats the heart of a needy child. So we need a commitment that sets no advance limits to caring.
Care and consistency are point and counterpoint in the music of marriage. They are played in a delicate duet of mutual need. And we have got to be forever improvising on the score of who cares for whom and who is cared for at any given moment of need. Each of the players trusts the other to move in to take up the slack when one of them misses a beat.
Living out of commitment is more like New Orleans jazz than a classical Haydn piece. It is improvising on theme called promise. If we can't improvise we have we a bad problem.
When we care deeply for each other, we gradually get linked into each other's lives, woven into each other's being. We may love each other with mild and, once in a while, if we are lucking, with, desire, and even hate each other for a little while. But we keep on improvising new ways of caring through the undertow of passion and the overflow of commitment.
Our need for caring does not stop; we neved outgrow it. So when two weak and needy and flawed persons share their lives, they need a commitment that does not have any options for quitting whenever one person requires too much care.
I've been saying that we have two basic human needs that make a lifetime commitment crucial to a marriage. We need to trust someone with our gift. We need to trust someone to care for us. Now we must think about the needs that a third party has for both of us.
Our Children Need To Trust Us
Our fathers and mothers had a hunch that a marriage wasn't complete without children for whom to care. Something in me feels that they had a point.
I become tuned in to my own feelings about this when Doris and I decided to adopt our three children.
Why did we do it? I'll tell you why I think we did it: I think we were following an impulse we couldn't resist, an inner nudge to give our marriage a deeper meaning than we could give it by ourselves. The gift of love we gave each other motivated us to want to give the gift of life to others. And adoption was the closest thing we could come to it.
We were not being noble at all, as if we were giving these three kids a break. We knew that. And, to be honest, we didn't offer them that great a deal anyway; there were other couples waiting to adopt children, and they might have been better parents for them than we were. Anyway, we adopted them for our own sakes.
Children are one reason why a commitment to a spouse is different from a friend. Commit yourself to a friend, and you make a promise to a single person. Commit yourself to a husband or a wife, and you are making a commitment to your children too. To the third and fourth generations. They are grafted into our commitment; they have their own claim on the commitment we make to each other.
Our children are not waiting in line for a free ticket into our marriage, they don't knock on our door and beg to be part of the deal. We sneak them inside of our commitment to each other without consulting their references. We tuck them inside of our own coupling. And when we do, we endow them with an inalienable right to have us both around as long as they need us.
Children get anxious if they so much wonder much whether their parents really intend to stick together. They feel double-crossed if their parents actually leave each other. When two parents cannot keep the commitment they once made to each other, they fail a commitment to the kids. And it hurts them; there seems to be no way of getting around it.
I will take a cue from what psychologist Archibald Hart says in his book "Children of Divorce", and run through some of the hurt most children feel when their parents get divorce.
GRIEF: When children lose one of their parents to a divorce, they feel it the way a parent feels a death in the family.
CONFLICT: When children are forced to choose between two people they need, they feel caught and wounded in the conflict.
FEAR: When children feel their secure family structurtrembling like a bridge in an earthquake, they tremble too, for fear of what will happen to them next.
GUILT: When their parents can't stay together, their children have a guilty hunch that it is their fault.
DEPRESSION: When children lose someone they need to fill out the meaning of their lives, they are programmed for depression.
ENOUGH. It isn't the end of the world for children of divorce. They are not dammed to some inferior status ever after. They usually survive and often succeed, but their resilience does not take away the hurt when it happens. It is a blow. No child who feels it ever deserves it, and none forgets it.
So when we ask why unconditional commitment still makes sense for marriage, children are part of the answer. A commitment to each other is a promise to them. They have a right to trust us to keep it.
Our Community Needs To Trust Us
Each of us needs a community of people to be supported by. We can't make it hanging on the thin, quivering branch of our individual, lonely existence. But a human community is a delicate web that is knit together with the invisible thread of personal commitments.
It isn't our laws, or our licenses, or our contracts that keep a community human. We need these legalities to hold each other accountable. We need them in our political and business organizations. But they are only supports we contrive to strengthen the network of personal commitments.
Real community, a sharing, caring community, is created by the trust we have in each other's personal promises. The trust we have in the free commitments we make to each other-with or without contracts.
The stronger our personal commitments are, the stroger the whole community is. If too many of us renege on our personal commitments, we weaken the web that holds a society together.
Marriage is one if the pivotal commitments in any community. When a lot of marriages break up, especially if a family is broken too, the thread of the web wears thin.
So our communities need to trust people to make lifetime commitments and to keep them.
We need to trust each other because we give each other so much. We need to trust each other because we have a need to be cared for; we have a child inside of us that never grows out of this need. And the Children we are committed to care for have a need-even a right-to trust us to stay together. Our community needs to trust us stay together; and because we have no life expect life in community, our community has a right to trust us too.
Our many-sided need to trust each other shows us the point of lifetime commitments, commitments without conditions, commitments without escape clauses.
But it is one thing to say that marriage needs a lifetime commitment, and quite another to assume that everyone can make good on that commitment, or even should.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing