KINGSVIEW

MAY YOU TELL ME YOUR SECRET ABOUT MARRIAGE

Michael A. King

"Mr. and Mrs. King," wrote our African son (who took on this role when our families adopted each other due to our daughter’s year of living with his), "may you tell me your secret about marriage." He asked this, he said, because he sees people marry, then soon divorce. We were saddened by this evidence that divorce is a cross-cultural tragedy, moved by his interest in our marriage, and stirred to thought.

Many of our friends’ marriages haven’t made it. We’ve watched their rifts broaden until too wide for crossing. We’ve navigated such awkwardnesses as which ex may prefer to attend which party with which child.

So why are we still married? Not because we’re perfect, our children who leave the room whenever one of the infamous Michael-Joan "negotiations" erupts, would confirm. Not because it has been happily ever after; we have dug many a canyon of our own. We think longingly of the thousands we spent, early in marriage, on counseling. Oh, if we could have invested it instead, those decades ago, and reaped the miracle of compounding, now if we hit rough patches our Money-We-Didn’t-Spend-on-Counseling Fund could send us to smooth things out there by crystalline rivers and blue lagoons.

So what is our secret? Probably that we have no secret. We’ve only been forced to learn, by trial and error and God’s undeserved grace mixed in, some combination of the same principles most couples have to practice to stay married amid the many pressures turning odds of making it no better than 50-50.

What are those principles? We don’t claim to know them all. Maybe there are 10, and each couple has to pick their essential handful. But for us they seem, the older we get, to be boiling down to three.

That would be negotiating money, sex, and power, right? Actually once upon a time yes. The first half of our marriage did seem to revolve around resolving that classic trio. Again and again we had to fight our way through to fresh accommodations in these areas. But in the midst of matters so complex whole tomes on their implications for marriage have been written, simpler, gentler principles turn out also to have been trying to be noticed. These are our current three:

First is sharing a sense of mission. When we first met, Joan still a teenager and I barely in my twenties, we were both dreaming of doing something with our lives beyond the same-old same-old. Joan debated being a missionary to Russia. I investigated spending time in Poland with a Mennonite service agency. Neither dream came true. Yet how often, these three decades later, we realize that one of the strongest ties that binds us remains that ongoing yearning to do something more with our lives. So we’ve spent countless hours listening both to the other’s individual call of the soul as well as exploring what our souls are calling us to offer together.

Second is a principle so simple probably most of us have to get kicked around a good long time by life and each other before we believe in its power: be nice to each other more often than mean. Recently we ran across John Gottman’s "magic ratio," which, based on research into hundreds of marriages, suggests that a marriage needs five positive interactions for every negative one. Fall below 5 to 1, and expect trouble.

I tested this as crassly as I could: I started phoning Joan and telling her I was just trying to get closer to 5 to 1. Even this method of implementing the ratio turns out to generate delightfully tender mutual energies.

Third is what Joan and I have come to call the leaves. Yes, the leaves. Early in our relationship we’d lie on the floor under the library study tables at Eastern Mennonite University and talk and talk. One day under "my" carrel, middle of second floor facing Lehman Auditorium, we got to talking about the leaves. It was autumn, and as so often on the EMU campus, the leaves were hauntingly lovely. We found out that both our spirits ached with longing in the presence of those leaves and that the sharing of the longing made the aching even sweeter.

The leaves have become our shorthand. They stand for everything in God’s creation that makes our spirits not only ache for the beauty out there but also throb with the joy of jointly cherishing it—whether under cottonwoods in the desert Southwest, mango trees in Africa, or the common old maples on our front lawn.

So there you have it, dear son: Common mission. Nice more than mean. The leaves.

—Michael A. King, Telford, is owner and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine. This article was first published in The Mennonite (Oct. 2, 2007, p. 30), as a "Real Families" column.