A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer
Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor
9/28/03
           
                
 LOVE AND MARRIAGE 2003

"Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage.
This I tell you brother, you can't have one without the other."
 
Isn't that a wonderful sentiment!

And we all know it's not true.

Love and marriage do not always go together.

People marry for money and to preserve a dynasty. People marry to gain residency 
or citizenship. People marry for sex and people marry because of pregnancy. 
People marry to escape their families and families arrange marriages for their 
children. 

Sometimes people don't know why they get married and regret it afterwards. After 
a quarrel, a husband said to his wife, "You know, I was a fool when I married 
you." She replied, "Yes, dear, but I was in love and didn't notice."

There are marriages that begin in love and end in bitterness.

A woman inserted an ad in the classifieds, "Husband wanted." She received a 
hundred letters the next day, all saying the same thing: "You can have mine."

Marriage does not always involve love, any more than love always involves 
marriage.

Sometimes people who are already married fall in love with somebody other than 
their spouse, and feel they cannot obtain a divorce: because of religious objections 
to divorce, because of financial hardship, because of the impact on the children, 
because their spouse is desperately ill and needs them. 

Sometimes people love each other and fear that getting married would spoil that 
love. Gay and lesbian couples have only recently and in only a few places been 
able to get married, and polyamorous lovers still cannot. 

Love is not always realized in marriage.

But it ought to be! 

If it is to be, we need to look at what marriage has been, what it is now, and what 
we would like for it to be.

Different societies across the centuries and around the globe today have different 
ways of understanding marriage. Some involve complicated rituals. In other places 
the people involved need only say that they wish to be married. Dowries are 
sometimes required, from bride or from groom or from both. Sometimes civil 
authorities determine the rules of getting married, sometimes religious authorities 
do, and sometimes both are involved.

In the western world, Jews and Muslims have always insisted on religious rituals 
confirming a marriage. Divorce, while possible, is very hard to obtain, and almost 
impossible for a woman in these two traditions.

Marriage in Christianity
] has a mixed history. For over a thousand years, the church was not involved and 
marriage was not thought to be a sacrament. If historian John Boswell is right, the 
first partnership rituals may well have been for male lovers. Only in the 13th 
century did the church demand that its members be married within the church by a 
priest and that divorce was spiritually unacceptable.

Protestants discarded the notion of marriage as a sacrament and defined it as a 
contract founded in and bound by love. With the secularization of western society 
during the Enlightenment, even in countries with Established religions, marriage 
became predominantly a legal arrangement.

That understanding has now been eroded. The American Heritage Dictionary of 
1987 gave as the primary definition of marriage, "the state of being married; 
wedlock," with no mention of legal status.

The last half century has seen a number of changes in marriage both as practiced 
and as imagined.

More than one out of every two marriages ends in divorce, which has become 
increasingly easy to obtain.

According to the 2000 Census, there are almost 20 million single householders 
who are raising more than 10 million children. There are some six million 
unmarried couples living together, more than 10% of whom are same sex couples. 
Of the 55 million heterosexual couples married to each other, less than half of the 
individuals in these marriages are in their first marriage. 

As an article in last month's Ann Arbor News pointed out, "ruling by ruling, vote 
by vote, in courtrooms and boardrooms and town halls nationwide, the makers of 
day-to-day policies are extending greater recognition and support to…(non-
traditional families)."

Events this past summer have given greater impetus to the changes.

The Supreme Court in its 6-3 decision in the Lawrence case overturned its own 
ruling of 17 years ago, saying in essence that what people do in the privacy of their 
own homes is their business and not the state's. 

Canada now recognizes the marriage of same sex couples on the same basis as 
heterosexual couples. So does Belgium.

An exhaustive study of gay families was released this summer, showing that such 
couples stay together with as much frequency as heterosexual couples and that "on 
virtually every level of psychological adjustment—including peer relationships, 
gender development, intelligence, school performance and sexual orientation—
children raised by gay parents are not significantly different from those raised by 
straight parents."

My own family certainly reflects the different approaches to relationships and to 
marriage common in today's society. 

My daughter has been married to the same man for 17 years. Together they raise 
my two grandsons and together they live their lives, rarely being out of contact for 
more than a few hours. 

One son endured a disastrous ten-year marriage and has been living with a lovely 
woman for the past13 months, when he is not serving a tour of duty in Iraq.

My third child lives in a polyamorous family, within which my six year old 
granddaughter is being happily raised.

It is not easy to understand what marriage is today because it seems to be so many 
things to different people.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says it is a sacrament to be enjoyed by only one 
man and one woman together.

Economics professor Gary Becker writes of marriage as an economic formula.

Laura Kipnis, in her new book AGAINST LOVE: A POLEMIC, writes of 
marriage as an enslavement, "a catalogue of strictures, commands, and 
punishments so unending that you will begin to wonder why no one has yet 
invoked the Geneva Convention when it comes to couple relations" Kipnis 
celebrates adultery and lust.

Valerie Schultz thinks that lust is great, but inside a marriage where the sex is 
"user-friendly, loving, unitive, procreative—and also, to be honest, hot, satisfying, 
and the most fun of all earthly pleasures."

The Pope thinks marriage is for having children. Then we should follow the 
example of Saints Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrochi who had four children and 
then quit having sex altogether.

Will marriage survive the confusion of these and a myriad of other views?

Yes, of course. Marriage will survive in part because of the truth in what Socrates 
observed: "By all means, marry; if you get a good spouse, you will become happy; 
if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher."  

The world is always in need of happiness and of philosophers.

But far more importantly marriage will survive because it addresses human needs: 
the need for sex, the need for closeness, the need to trust someone enough to be 
dependent upon them and to care for them enough to let them be dependent upon 
you; the need most of us feel to have children and the importance of having some 
stable social institution that helps to protect those children. 

While it is true that marriage is not for everyone—I have a 71 year old brother who 
has been very happily not married all his life—it is also true that marriage is a very 
good state for most people. A recent study by Linda Waite and Maggie 
Gallagher—THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE: WHY MARRIED PEOPLE ARE 
HAPPIER, HEALTHIER, AND BETTER OFF FINANCIALLY—makes this 
clear.

They learned that "married people live longer, are healthier, have fewer heart 
attacks and other diseases, have fewer problems with alcohol, behave in less risky 
ways, have more sex—and more satisfying sex—and become much more wealthy 
than single people. There is one exception to this rosy picture: cohabiting couples 
do have more frequent sex. But they enjoy it less."

Marriage is part of human society. The reason for this is found in these moving 
words of the late Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies: "What are we, any of us, 
but strangers and sojourners, forlornly wandering through the nighttime until we 
draw together and find the meaning of our lives in one another, dissolving our fears 
in each other's courage, making music together and lighting torches to guide us 
through the dark. We belong together. Love is what we need. To love and be loved.

That is why marriage will survive. We need it. As a place where we can love and 
be loved. It may be true, as the cynic said, that marriage is a triumph of 
imagination over intelligence and second marriages a triumph of hope over 
experience, but love trumps all other factors.

We need marriage if we are the traditional man and woman coming together for a 
lifetime. I have performed more than a thousand of these kinds of wedding 
celebrations for people as young as 16 and people as old as 79.

We need marriage if we are a gay male or a lesbian couple who want to join their 
lives together. I have performed some 50 of these services, though never as a legal 
ceremony because the law in Michigan at this time forbids granting licenses to 
same sex couples. For the past 19 years I have performed these ceremonies with 
the endorsement of the Unitarian Universalist Association, one of the very few 
religious movements that has given its full endorsement to same sex marriages.

We need marriage if we are three or four people who wish to pledge themselves to 
one another in love and fidelity. I have performed several of these polyamorous 
ceremonies, and will do so for my son and his family next June when he graduates 
from college. Again, marriage licenses are not available to these people.

We need marriage even if being legally married would work severe hardship on us, 
as for years it did and perhaps still does for older widows and widowers who will 
lose needed retirement funds if they legally remarry. I have done a couple dozen of 
these companionate ("in the eyes of God") marriages.

Our understanding of marriage needs to be broad-minded. It needs to recognize the 
many ways in which love comes to us and that we respond to it. We need to realize 
that our love is for another person, not for a category into which that person fits. 
That is why sometimes people who have been exclusively heterosexual find 
themselves in love with a person of the same sex, and someone who was sure she 
was gay ends up happily marrying a man. 

Love is not limited by gender or by number and to some extent not even by age. 
There must be laws to protect the mentally incompetent and children, yet what 
shall we say of the historians Will and Ariel Durant? He was 27, her teacher, and 
she was 14, when they married. She roller-skated to her wedding, and together they 
skated through more than 60 years of marriage and work. 

What matters in a relationship is love, not tradition, not money, not religion, not 
ethnic heritage or color or height or weight or occupation. We love a person not a 
category.

What is required of us to make that marriage last?

Admittedly some do not care whether their relationships last. One wag said that 
getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order 
what you want, then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had 
ordered that.

An interview with a movie star that appeared in the New York Times last Sunday 
made clear that this is his attitude. He spoke of his divorce from another movie star 
and their hostile discussions about who gets what money and what property. He 
was bemoaning the fact that he had no pre-nuptial agreement, as though he knew 
all along that their marriage would not last. He suggested that all marriages should 
have a "pre-nup" as a protection against what is likely to happen, namely 
separation and divorce.

Many of us have a higher ideal for our marriages and plans for a longer time-line. 
What do we need?

The philosopher Charles Hartshorne suggested that one thing often overlooked is 
sheer luck. 

Many relationships begin with a chance encounter. We go to a church group 
meeting of some kind and find someone we've never talked to in any depth 
completely fascinating. Maybe we are ready to open ourselves to a relationship at 
that point, having dealt with the sadness of our past Maybe our enchanting 
companion has just emerged from a sadness of his own. Luck, not planning, brings 
us together, and we are wise enough to take it from there.

Maybe the encounter is with someone we have known a long time or someone we 
knew a long time ago, only this time sparks fly. I think of my dear friend Bessie, 
unmarried to the age of 79, when she ran into a man she had dated and liked but 
not loved in her early 20's. He was a widower. Now she saw something in him that 
touched the depths of her heart, and within weeks they were married, and had five 
wonderful years together.

Luck is part of what makes for a good marriage. We do not know when war will 
separate us, as it did so many couples in the Second World War, with sometimes 
grievous results. We do not know or plan for illnesses, job loss, relatives imposing 
on us, or any of the other factors that can strain a marriage that come hurtling at us 
from outside the bounds of our lives.

To make a marriage work, we need good luck. When it comes our way, we should 
nod to the universe in gratitude and seize the opportunity.

We also need commitment. 

Commitment involves some kind of vision of what life together should be like. The 
partners should have some common idea of why they are together, have a common 
sense of a good way to live each day, and be willing to work with each other to 
achieve common goals. 

Commitment in marriage means that the marriage comes first. Things that harm the 
relationship are avoided. Things that help the relationship are done. It is easy, as 
too many of us have first hand experience in knowing, for other things to eat away 
at the foundations of a marriage.

Work can be one of those things, especially if we spend more time doing work 
than being with our spouse and children.

Television, especially for sports addicts, can intrude on our commitment to 
marriage, as can computers. 

Commitment in marriage means commitment to being part of a couple and to 
doing those things that strengthen and enliven the relationship. Friends of mine 
through all the years of their long marriage spent the last minutes of the day 
together: sharing a glass of wine and talking over the day just past and the day 
ahead when at home, leaving whatever had taken one of them to another city in 
time to be together on the phone at 11:00 every night to draw close even across the 
distance that separated them. 

Commitment means accepting whatever comes and remaining true to our vows of 
commitment. The familiar traditional words in our society are "for better for 
worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health." They can be harder words 
to live by than we realize on our wedding day.

Judy found this out when her husband was convicted of a felony and sent to prison 
for four years for something that was not his fault. His brother turned state's 
evidence against him and got off with a suspended sentence, though his guilt was 
far greater. That brother's wife divorced him, but Judy stayed with Jack, visiting 
him regularly, putting together their ruined finances, nurturing their wounded 
children, and when he got out of prison helping him to find his place in society 
again.

If we are truly committed to our marriage, if we live that commitment every day, 
then whether time brings us good fortune or bad, our marriage will be strong.

We need commitment to each other. We need as well to go on choosing each other.

I remember hearing the theologian Peggy Way speak of what she felt was the most 
important factor in her long marriage. She said it was that she and Bill went on 
choosing each other as the best possible human being with whom they could live. 
She said it did not happen every day necessarily, but it did happen often, and 
always after they had been through a rough patch together. 

Choosing one another over and over again helps us to appreciate the other person 
and not take her for granted. It is easy to slide into comfortable habits and pay no 
attention to all that is required to make those habits comfortable. Perhaps it is the 
gardening that one person does not like to do or cannot do but that really adds 
much beauty to the home. Speaking our gratitude for the added loveliness is a way 
of choosing, a way of saying that I like this way of living and I am very lucky to be 
a part of it.

Another reason it is important to continually be choosing one another is that 
change is such an enormous part of our lives. There are changes over which we 
have no control—the ending of the Cold War, the coming of computers, the 
downturn in the economy over the last three years, for example. Any of these and 
hosts of other factors can cause us to gain or lose a job, make our lives simpler or 
more complicated, turn security into uncertainty or misery into delight. We will be 
changed as life changes around us, and one of the hallmarks of our age is that life 
does exactly that all the time.

Aging also changes us. We gain weight, get wrinkled, feel our memory slipping 
away, get tired more quickly, lose our hair or see it turn gray. Now that gravity 
seems to be winning the battle with my body and my brain has lost so many cells 
that I am not sure who I am any more, do you still care about me?

Sometimes our values change as we reflect on our life experiences. Some of us 
find a new spiritual path on which to walk. Some of us turn away from work we 
have done out of a sense of disappointment or anger. Friendships do not always 
survive the beating of the years. As we change, we need to know we are still loved. 
We need to go on choosing one another through all the changes.

Marriage, in other words, is a process. Rebecca Mead, in a review of a book 
denouncing marriage, writes wisely:  "But what if utopia was not merely glimpsed 
in the heady, vanishing moment of falling in love but was actually the project of 
enduring love? What if the expression of that love was the ongoing construction of 
a better world in domestic microcosm?"

Theodore Parker was pointing to the same thing, speaking of happy wedlock as 
being "a long falling in love." 

Sam Levenson reminded us that "love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when 
two people have been looking at each other for years that it's a miracle."

Part of helping to make that miracle happen is by choosing our partner again and 
again and again in a mutual "project of enduring love."

Good luck and commitment and continuous choosing can help create and sustain a 
good marriage. So can communication and trust, kindness and sacrifice, mutual 
respect and patience, and many other things.

Nothing in the essentials of marriage requires that only one man and one woman 
engage in such a relationship. Thoughtfulness requires that we honor all couples or 
triads or larger groupings of whatever sexual orientation whose relationships are 
grounded in love and who seek societal validation for that love.

At its worst, marriage can be destructive of everything decent and vital in human 
life.

At its best, marriage can give us faith in our selves and a large faith in humanity. 

For all of us who are now engaged in this adventure or who come to it on some 
future day, may we know an increasing measure of the love, the friendship, and the 
joy that is marriage at its best.

Then maybe we can sing honestly that wonderful sentiment
               "Love and marriage, love and marriage,
               Go together like a horse and carriage.
               This I tell you brother, you can't have one without the other."


Copyright 2003, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved