Marriage: The Half Time Report

Half Time

It is our 28th wedding anniversary today.

I am 56 years of age. Single for 28 years. Married to Jill for 28 years. April 20th 1996.

The tipping point into longer being married than not. And that’s tomorrow. For me. Not for Jill, she is a few years younger than I. But for me, half and half. So this is a half-time report.

Well not exactly half and half. I was 10, 445 days single. And I’ve been married 10,227 days. So in another 218 days – day 20, 890 of my life it will be equi-distant. November 24th 2024 to be nerdily exact. But as I say, let’s not quibble. The fulcrum of my single/married life. Single and marriage for the exact same length of time. But you get the drift, in terms of years at least.

Mind you, while I was mulling that over, I realised how few days 20, 672 actually is and how I have way shorter left than I have done. My goodness where did it go? Not so much the 20 thousand, but the last 8 thousand or so. The thousands of days of school lunches and school runs, and work lunches and work runs, and church sermons and church lunches. Time does speed up as you get older, surely. And just as surely as you slow down.

But in light of the fact that it is half time or so, here’s the locker room coach’s chat for you all. You see marriage in our culture has taken something of a battering. It was scorned and abused and accused for half of my life, especially in the Arts Departments of the universities we frequented. It was, as was often put in my cultural studies class, a “licence to rape”.So capitalist!

No one wanted it. No one admired it. The Rom Coms were an exception, but they always ended at the alter, not the sick bed, or the nursery with a crying baby at 2am, or the work and school routine of limp lunches, late dinners and weekends driving from one sporting event to the other.

Everyone at uni had a horror tale of how bad marriage was, especially those young ex-Catholic-school-girls who were loosed from the strictures of Hail Mary’s and the ideal woman. Marriage was so pilloried, so blighted and so talked about in derogatory terms, that it was almost a core first year unit in itself.

Marriage: The Right

And then in the second half of my life, suddenly marriage wasn’t scorned. It was the thing that completes you. It was the final thing that heteronormative people were holding away from queer folk. It was the right that everyone had to have. It was no longer a gift from God, it was a right that the state could withhold or deliver.

All of a sudden – though the marriage frog took its time to reach fatal boiling temperature – there could be no true equality, no true freedom, no final completion of the self. Justice Kennedy of the US Supreme Court made some big claims when that country signed up to same sex marriage upon his decision:

“Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.”

Or how about this?:

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.”

From “a licence to rape” to the solution to a universal fear and an expression of the overturning of injustice. Well that de-escalated quickly!

Yet here’s the thing. Today I am lonely. Justice Kennedy was on to something. Lonely because I am currently living more than five thousand kilometres from home working for several months in New Zealand. I’ve had a busy week with lots of great people at a great church to get to know, and who are kind, and funny and helpful and godly and all the things you’d want to see in the people of God.

A Lonely Boy

But Jill is not here with me. She was. And she will be in about five weeks for ten days. But she is not here now. And all the people in the world do not make up for Jill. Hey folks, if you are reading this, I love ya! But Jill? Well Jill is something special. Someone special. And to not have here her with me in the golden, curling leaves of autumn-leaves on a crisp Christchurch morning feels like something is missing at the centre. There is a huge hole in my world without her. Joy is complete in the sharing, and she is not here to share those things with me at the moment.

Jill and I have spent most of our lives “hunting in a pack” – doing church ministry together. Though perhaps the “hunting in a pack” metaphor is a trifle awry! But you get it – we were one the day we married and that’s how we have operated. Not that we always think as one or act as one, or even like the same things. But our “oneness” is in the same sense that the body of Christ has a oneness with Christ, not something we “attain”, but something we “maintain” on the basis of our vows (c.f. Ephesians 4:3).

We chatted today on WhatsApp, me four hours in front of Perth here in New Zealand, and I don’t know if that made things better or worse, or just grateful for the fact that although so much social media takes away, it also gives on the other hand. Just to see her again!

I remember the first time I saw her. She walked into a meeting in church back in Wesley Uniting Church in 1993, and my first thought upon seeing her was “I want to marry her!” True. Tacky, but true. And then just to see her today, full of COVID, not quite awake, and barely out of bed, that same thrill of seeing her. Also tacky. But also true.

And it’s funny, but some days when I go to the supermarket late afternoons in order to get groceries for dinner, I see Jill in there on her way home from work. And as she walks down that supermarket aisle past the cereal and the bread a bit tired and distracted, the scene transmogrifies into another aisle altogether, the one at Wesley Church (we also married there), and my heart jumps like it did back then. Getting to see her when I didn’t expect to!

I think of those rather morbid – literally – post-mortem paintings and early photographs of loved ones, painted or captured in the day or so after death in order for their loved ones to remember, just to see them again. A bit icky at first glance.

But that’s the point. There won’t be a first glance. There’ll be a final glance. And in an ephemeral age, in which memory stole our mental images, with no way to capture them on a regular basis, we resorted to the love and anguish of post-mortem images. We barely ever see a dead body, but to carry that image around, to hang it on the wall! We were built to be eternal! We know it in our bones! We feel it under our skin. It wakes us up at 3am, thinking about death.

What does it mean to return, and to return and to return to that final image? And us? We have thousands of them stored, unloved, unremembered. Although the beauty of an iPhone wallpaper means I carry Jill’s face – and update it from time to time – everywhere I go.

And speaking of death. Jill and I lie in bed often in a morning and gently mourn the fact that we have less time ahead of us than behind. We will have to leave each other. I read the most gut-wrenching blog post from my friend Hamo the other day about the sudden realisation that keeps gripping him that his dearly loved son, Sam, is gone forever. A diving accident took his life. Hamo has bravely put his feelings out there for so many people. It feels we can’t mourn the “goneness” enough! Have a read of what he wrote.

And okay, let’s talk about sex. It had to be mentioned surely. I just want to put this to younger folk, especially Christian younger folk who have fallen for the cultural narrative that as time ages you, and as age sags you, that somehow sex downgrades. Whereas once it was every flavour of ice cream available, it gradually reduces itself to vanilla. That is simply not true. It is not true that you feel less enamoured, less turned on, or less anything with your spouse as you age. Quite the opposite. Sticking close to Jesus as a couple makes sex better! Jesus is not prudish about us.

Now it can be true that those things fall away. But that’s not age and familiarity. If anything, familiarity moves things up a gear.The level of trust between a married couple should, given a maintenance of that trust, lead to a greater intimacy. Don’t believe Netflix. Don’t believe Hollywood. Don’t believe Hollywood couples with an age gap of 30 years, in which the man has traded up three or four times (honourable exceptions being the likes of Keanu Reeves and Kevin Bacon).

The great irony is, that for all that sexual freedom the post-Christian era supposedly gave us, younger people are having less sex that in the past. And the levels of porn us and abuse of women in casual hook ups has gone through the roof. And the level of abuse of women in casual hook ups has gone through the roof often because the level of porn use has gone through the roof.

I listen to the secular comedians, and every second observational joke is about a rubbish Tinder date. And they’re supposed to be ahead of the curve? They beckon us to laugh with them in their shame and horror-show, and often it’s funny – tragically funny. Christian young people, if you take your cues from anyone, take them from the parents who love you, or the older couple at church who have seen it all, dealt with it all, and still love through it all.

And for those of you single? Or divorced? Never looking at getting married? Want to get married? Single because that’s a legitimate way to be (which it is, despite what the neo-conservative Christianised patriarchy will tell you)?

Here’s what I want. I want my married friends and my single friends to be great friends and to spend appropriate amounts of time with each other, serving each other with the gifts they best have. For the singles, sometimes that is simply the gift of time! Oh you do not realise how much many married people with children just crave some time! To have a single friend hang out, play with kids, take the kids out for an ice cream.

That stuff is gold! To get married and have children is to tacitly admit that your time is no longer your own. Not that it ever was, it always belongs to God, but God’s purpose for a married couple with children is to, among other things, keep this little polis intact.

And I use the word polis intentionally. The family unit is the primary mediating institution in our culture between the naked individual and the state. And here’s the thing: Over-reaching, over-bearing statism hates anyone getting in the way of it and the naked individual. Statism does not view your kids as yours, but as theirs. That’s why they want you all back at work and not discipling your children slow and long.

Corporations aren’t much better. They’ll pay women to put their eggs on ice so that they can get the best of your years, the youngest, most sturdy of your years, and when you are worn out, or the decision becomes harder to have children because you’re further up the ladder and have more to lose, you can throw the fag-ends to your children.

My Marriage Heroes

One of my marriage heroes isn’t even married. Any more. She is eighty this year, and she was left by her husband – my dad – when she was forty. So in a sense she has done the two halves of her life also. Married the day after her 21st, divorced by 41, and now single approaching eighty.

Mum has done it hard because she loved Dad until the day he died. As she vowed that she would. Dad didn’t love her until the day he died. He betrayed her and left her for a much younger woman at his factory where he worked. (the working class man’s version of Hollywood). But years later, after his second divorce, he realised that he did in fact love her, and that he had loved himself and what he wanted far too much in those intervening years.

Mum’s singleness, although hard on her and hard on her family, has not been a curse. She has never seen fit to remarry, or even go out with anyone else. She has a joy in Jesus that many people do not have. And she is a wonderful example of God’s faithfulness in looking after the widow and the orphan. Two halves of her life, and God has been her God in both halves. She has always looked to God to supply her every need. And he has. Not that it has not been without grief. Grief and struggle. But I look at mum at eighty and I see a woman who has focussed her eyes on the marriage feast of the Lamb on the first day of the new creation. Mum and Dad will be able to talk about many things in the new creation, not least of all how her undying love for him led to his softened heart, and gratitude as dementia took a grip on him and finally killed him.

And how could I go past my parents-in-law who have been just as much my parents to me as my parents were to me?! And there is some symmetry in their lives too. Jill was born on their first wedding anniversary. Every year we get to celebrate both of those events on the same day. Them one year ahead of Jill. Which, all things being equal (but are they ever?) may end at some stage as they enter the final years of life. But fifty-six years. A migrant family just like mine, although coming from the inequality of South Africa, an altogether bigger challenge than our Northern Ireland experience.

The grief I feel at the thought of losing either of them is something that marriage has given me as well. Did you think about that? Marriage sets you up for some great possibilities. Some great jobs. And some great risks. And some great griefs. And then, as I wrote above, there’s the whole possibility of a grief that we find even more unbearable than losing a spouse; losing a child.

It’s fair to say that both Jill and I have discussed how we could cope with losing each other far more than we could cope with losing our child. Yet here we are living in a world – the West at least – in which children are either a necessary evil, or an unnecessary evil.

Pitched often as a risk to your career or a risk to the planet or a risk to your “You Do You” campaign. If you want a “You Do You” campaign, then don’t have children. I was in Sydney’s hip gay capital the other week, Surry Hills, all cafes, funky terraces and French bulldogs. The odd kid here or there. But nowhere near the level of dogs. And people stopped in the streets to admire each others’ – dogs. Stood talking for ages about them. Praising them. Talking about their habits. Good Lord deliver us!

And of course God can deliver us from that. I spent much of my time that week in Surry Hills at a local evangelical church with people that were as hip and urban and successful as the singles in the area, but with kids by the bucketload. Children and nappies/diapers and drying out swimsuits and strollers and bike carriers as far as the eye could see. Joyous and hopeful in Jesus. Because, let’s face it, culture’s don’t lose hope because they stop having children: they stop having children because they lose hope. And marriage and kids go together – usually, though often painfully not always – so let’s never forget that.

So that’s a rather rambling half-time report. And lest you think I’ve forgotten Jill in the midst of all of this, let me just say that I’m counting days again. Counting days until like that first time I saw her back at Wesley Uniting Church, my heart jumps again when she rounds the corner and comes through the airport arrival doors, tired, bedraggled, perhaps a little grumpy, but finally with me again!