As Jaycee and I celebrated our 2 weeks of marriage with a drive up the Hamakua Coast to the sacred Waipio Valley lookout and a delicious Merriman’s dinner in old town Waimea, I thought I’d share some reflections on the temporal nature of marriage.
It fascinates me how uncertain life is. After about some 30,000 years of human history and the marvelous advances in the last 200 years of modern innovation and geopolitical maturation, you might expect life to be a little more predictable. Yet it isn’t. No job interviewer will ask you for your 10 year career goals because they know it is simply unpredictable and that any contrived plans will just fade into aspirations. Most people have trouble knowing exactly what their day will look like, few are able to manage their financial budgets beyond 3 years, and even fewer master the discipline to sort out their lives so as to make accurate 5 year life plans.
And yet marriage is a “death do you part” plan. For me and Jaycee we hope that this means at least 60 or more years together. And yeah, today’s 50/50 odds of divorce argue in favor of chaos, entropy and unpredictability. Yet Jaycee and I (and any newly wed for that matter) are dreamers and we really do believe it is possible for us to make the joint plan together to fight for each other and do life together for 60+ years. But if I can’t even know for sure where I’ll work in 10 years, what my health will be like or if and how many kids we will have… what makes me think I can bank on our marriage lasting across 6 or more decades.
Well what also lasts across 6 or more decades are debt and contracts. And so will our marriage vows. It’s our sacred vows to each other before God and the cloud of witnesses (our friends and family) that bind us into this blood contract. Like student debt which is also a blood contract, death do you part type of deal. So that’s the key to making plans beyond 10 years. The more sacred the promise, the contract, the vow, the longer we can predict the future. Because by making the vow, we enslave ourselves to that future, by sacrificing the present!
Wow that got weirdly philosophical.
