Aww, marriage. Depending on who you ask, it can be life’s greatest source of happiness or greatest source of misery, or both. While the number of American households containing married couples has fallen from 78.8% in 1949 to 46.8% today, it’s an institution that still looms large in our cultural, social, and economic landscape.
Certainly, plenty of folks are still getting married. The marriage services industry has now more than rebounded to its pre-pandemic level. In my own church, October has been the busiest month for weddings this year with a stretch of four weddings in three weeks. And thanks be to God! Unlike all the cynics and curmudgeons out there, I love weddings. Yes, they’re often ridiculously extravagant, but they can also be fun, beautiful, and crammed full of heartfelt hopes and dreams. I still find it hard not to tear up when two people are finally pronounced husband and wife before God and their closest friends and family.
But there’s also part of me that wants to warn them. As Thomas Merton put it: “As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another.” That’s why the best wedding sermons are the low anthropology ones — the ones that lower your expectations of transformation and fulfillment, the ones that strike an essential balance between the joys and intense challenges of marriage.
Although not a sermon, few authors have done a better job of writing about what modern marriage is like than Heather Havrilesky in her recent blockbuster book Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022) — the subject of our next Mockingbird Zoom Book Club, coming up this Sunday, October 29, at 5pm (EST) (note the time change!). Leading us through this remarkable book will be longtime Mockingbird contributor Stephanie Phillips, joining us from her home all the way across the globe in Sydney, Australia.
Whether you’re married or not, Havrilesky’s book is an extraordinary and hilarious read that gets at the heart of what makes all human relationships so challenging: humans. “We are both catastrophically flawed,” Havrilesky writes. And that’s the problem. For any preachers out there who might want to spice up their wedding sermons, there’s no shortage of fantastic passages to draw from. Take, for example, this excerpt from the first chapter:
It’s a feature, not a bug. Marriage is designed to break you. You will forget everything you knew before. You will tremble under the weight of your own shortcomings. Sure, you might bounce back and proclaim yourself lucky and declare your marriage happy and become the masochist your marriage wants you to be. But you’ll still wake up plenty of mornings wondering why you signed on to drag this wretched, snoring heap of meat with you everywhere you go until the day you die.
And once you’re married and therefore a true masochist, you’ll realize that all of these sensations are part of the delicious tedium of matrimony. I wrote this book to explore that tedium, along with everything else that marriage brings: the feeling of safety, the creeping darkness, the raw fear and suspense of growing older together, the tiny repeating irritations, the rushes of love, the satisfactions of companionship, the unexpected rage of recognizing that your partner will probably never change. And in writing this book, I discovered new layers within my marriage and myself, haunting and chaotic, wretched and unlovable.
We talk about marriage like it’s just something people do, no big deal. We pretend that once you’re married, you’re either happy or unhappy, a binary system, on or off. But the truth is so much murkier and also much more frightening and exciting and joyful than that. Marriage grinds your face into the dirt until you can see new colors and taste new flavors. But you have to show up and invite it all in. You can’t hide.
While Havrilesky refers to marriage by any number of epithets — a “slowly blossoming garden of horrors,” a “primitive trap,” “the world’s most impossible endurance challenge” — in the end, after all kinds of ups and downs, she still manages to find something “divine” in the “tedium” or this sacred institution. If you’re interested in hearing more, even if you haven’t read the book, I hope you’ll join us on Zoom this coming Sunday for what will surely be a fascinating conversation.
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Future books, discussion leaders, and dates are:
October 29th — Stephanie Phillips, Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022) (304 pgs)
November 26th — Todd Brewer, T. S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1959)
