The setting of Jesus' first miracle-his transmuting water into wine-is a wedding ceremony in Cana.
"All marriages take place at Cana," says a faithful Thomas Moore. Therefore all marriages are miracles.
At the unhappy end of the spectrum, others join Montaigne, who says, "The land of marriage has this peculiarity, that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, whilst its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished thence." But it isn't the marriage that causes the dissatisfaction, it's the problems of the people involved in the relationship.
Marion Solomon, in her book on the power of positive dependency in intimate relationships, identifies these disturbances under the rubrics of defensive dependency, anxious attachment, boundary busting, fragile connection, and defensive distancing. An even greater poison in relationships is the issue of mistrust, earned or not. An old Sufi parable, "The Ancient Coffer," as told in Moore, is a case in point:
A very respected man named Nuri Bey had married a much younger woman. A faithful servant reported to him that the wife was behaving suspiciously-sitting alone guarding an old wooden trunk that was big enough to contain a body (i.e., another man). When he asked her to unlock the large chest, she refused to do so because it would mean acceptance of his mistrust. Instead she handed him the key to do so himself. After pondering the situation, Nuri Bey and his servants carried the unopened coffer far away and buried it.
What was buried in that cold and lonely place was the soul of their marriage.
Most marriages start with some healthy ambivalence but also with good intentions. Two people faithfully enter an arrangement seeking many unspoken, if not unrecognized, fulfillments. They may end up with blissful epiphanies or bitter struggles. If an individual is expecting the partner to actualize his or her potential, that individual will frequently find that the partner falls short of that expectation, especially if the other is suffering from the same illusion. It is probably our idealization of relationships that causes marriage to be so vulnerable. One has to establish a healthy balance. If couples did not expect marriage to be their ultimate source of satisfaction, they would not be so susceptible to its disappointments. However, if their expectations are too low, even the marital relationships of people who relate well will take second place to work (mostly in men), children (mostly in women), or some other primary agenda.
Marriage at its best puts couples in a confusing dilemma: the attempt to have a union with someone else while maintaining an independent sense of self. Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary defines marriage as "the state or condition of community consisting of a master, a mistress, two slaves, making in all, two." The more the individual is undifferentiated, the greater the conflict with the partner. Marriage is a fertile ground for individuation as well as for union, but first one must be differentiated, just as a prisoner who wishes to help free his imprisoned companions must first break out of his own chains. Marriage requires attachment and individuation simultaneously, rather than sequentially, as it occurs in our early developmental years.
Adapted from The Art of Serenity
