The Perfect Marriage

You expect me to say, "There is no perfect marriage." I'm not going to say that.  I know of one  perfect marriage. But I'll get to that.

It's the music I was listening to that made me think of it as an analogy for marriage. So I'll first speak to marriage and then  to the music. This is written from the perspective of a heterosexual, since I am one, but I would think that this all holds true for same-sex marriages as well. I love what Kinky Friedman wrote, "I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us."

Richard Bach in One said that you'll find wedding in the dictionary somewhere between weaving and welding. That says it fairly well. I don't pretend to be any sort of expert  on marriage, but I do think that my forty plus years married to the same woman qualifies me to speak intelligently on the subject. My wife is fond of saying, "It's not the 50% that don't make it that amaze me, it's the 50% that do."  I take no offense in that comment.

For years I held the opinion that the Unity Candle during a wedding ceremony depicts a terrible image.  When done as usually performed, I still feel that way.  Normally, as the ceremony begins, the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom walk up and light their respective candles on a candelabra of three candles. Then later in the service, the bride and groom take their candle and simultaneously light the center candle. This is when the horror happens. They each blow out the original  candle and walk away. No! No! A thousand times no!  God forbid that you each cease to exist. And then from the smoke of the extinguished candles, somehow this unity person comes into being. Maybe the seeds of that 50% failure are planted right here. I now offer a better image from Unity Candles. The parents come up and light their candles, at the appointed time, the bride and groom light the center candle from those two respective candles. They leave all three burning and walk back to their places.

I do now believe that the wedding creates a new entity. You have two individuals who existed before the wedding and who continue to exist and then you have the marriage. As important as the marriage is, it does not supplant the individuals, or it shouldn't anyway. When the couple repeats those marriage vows, they create the marriage. But they have certainly not created just wine and roses. I've heard people brag on a couple and suggest how good their marriage is because "they never fight."  If a couple never argues, then somebody is never getting his or her way. If that's the case, you have no marriage, you have an autocracy.  One person has all the power. Granted,  disagreements that lead to shouting matches or worse can be damaging and even deadly to a marriage. But it's important that each partner's preferences are a part of that center entity. Sometimes the partner needs to push back even when it causes sparks to fly. The marriage will not only hold, but will be the better for it. More moderate and respectful disagreements can lead to less major fights like the long-term benefits of those frequent tremors in southern California.

I had my wife's car this afternoon which has no Sirius/XM radio. So I listened to music the old fashioned way with a CD. I was listening to one of my favorite bands, Breaking Benjamin. When a singer sings with instruments, it's called "accompaniment."  That accompaniment could be one instrument or an ensemble. The singer is a human being and those instruments do not breathe. The singer and the instruments are separate things. However, listening this afternoon the singer and the instruments  became one thing. I was no longer listening to the lead singer who was backed up by the instruments, I was listening to one thing--one combined sound. Obviously, this was not the first time I had heard this phenomenon, but it was the first time I heard his voice as an instrument and the instruments as his voice.  These very separate things created one thing--music.

The perfect marriage? The perfect marriage, in my opinion, is chocolate and peanut butter.  I enjoy chocolate and I enjoy peanut butter. They are different things.  But when you put them together, something extraordinary is created. I don't know what it's called, but Reese has made  billions from it. I'm not sure how Handel wrote Messiah in twenty one days. Some think it was a manic episode. May have been, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the inspiration started with chocolate and peanut butter. It's okay to extinguish the separate candles of chocolate and of peanut butter because what is created is far superior to what was left behind. And unlike two individuals in a marriage relationship, the chocolate and peanut butter, once combined, can never be anything else. And who would want them to be?

Weaving. Wedding. Welding. If that doesn't work out after several tries, you might consider just weaving or welding.