Undefining Marriage
“Til death do us part.”
Maybe?
And maybe not!
Our current cultural institution of marriage is set up to fail us as individual, empowered, free beings. It, by design, is a contract of silencing. It comes with the expectation that we look outside ourselves (to another) to heal and find freedom. This is impossible. The institution of marriage comes with a long list of roles that each party is expected to play and that keep us rejecting our essence over and over again. There is little room for spontaneity and creativity, and encouragement of co-dependency and projection. Sex often becomes stale and habituated. Desires are no longer communicated, if they ever were in the first place. Women are indoctrinated from birth to put all others needs before her own and to do an incredible amount of invisible labor on top of paid labor, mothering both their partners and their children. While men are expected to be knights in shining armor here to save the day and be the loving father figure their partner never had. This is a train wreck y’all. It is no wonder there is an incredible amount of divorce and it isn’t the celebratory kind of divorce where you recognize you are ready to evolve from old behaviors that have kept you disempowered. It is leaving with great resentment and frustration that your partner did not meet the ludicrous expectations society has put upon each of us and repeating the whole thing over again with another person. It is time to take a long, hard look at the lies we tell ourselves about love, approval, validation, and worth. We will continue to suffer until we are honest with ourselves about the choices we are actually making and the contracts we are saying yes to.
Most often marriage is a box defined by cultural expectations rather than by the individuals. A relationship needs to be spacious enough to be ever-evolving, consistently morphing with the individuals as they grow. When each partner becomes absorbed by the “us”, it then becomes co-dependent and based on the unconscious desire for the other to help us feel whole. However when this is named and both parties are diligently aware that this is the default pattern, it can be caught when it begins to happen and new choices can be made. The reason we welcome the habit of co-dependency so willingly is because we don’t have to take responsibility for our healing. We are terrified of rejection, isolation, feeling out of control, shame, and guilt, so much so that we will surrender who we are to avoid accepting those parts of ourselves. We are constantly encouraged by media and other people to maintain our victimhood status and remain in a disempowered, self-pitying state. When we are willing to be honest with ourselves that we all do this to some degree or another, we can begin to grow-up.
What does it mean to grow-up? We aren’t actually taught to be adults. It means to take full responsibility for all of our lives and not blame our partners (or others) for one bit of it. In order to do this, we need to develop a skill set on how to parent ourselves. The first step to doing this is to fully release your biological parents from any blame on your current life. Find forgiveness and understanding that they did the best they could with the level of consciousness they had and move on. Find solace in knowing that you learned valuable lessons, as painful as they may have been, and that is part of who you are today. Being willing to show up with the love, acceptance, and validation for the parts of yourself that your biological parents never did is an essential and deeply healing part of the transformation into true adulthood.
When we are willing to be completely honest with ourselves about why we chose to get married, we can begin to build a new construct that is supportive of continued growth, independence, and freedom for both parties. For many years I resisted getting married. I knew on some level that I did not want to be a part of the institution. Even when you write your own vows and have the best intention of supporting growth and staying true to yourself, as soon as you are married, the weight of societal expectations is undeniable. People treat you differently. Assumptions are made about what it means to be married. The “rules” now apply to you. For me, as a bi-sexual woman married to a man, it was as if half of my life was erased. When I finally chose to get married, it was definitely from a place of contraction rather than expansion. I wanted to push aside the parts of myself I was most ashamed of and not hear from them again. I adopted the roles and silenced myself even more than I already had been. It was the final frontier of self-abandonment for me. This sounds like a bleak description and on the inside it was. On the outside, I had a happy life and others looked up to my partnership as a model that was thriving. Fortunately, I chose a partner where we did have a lot of awareness and we did support one another to grow, and at the same time there was a whole host of unconsciousness about how we are supposed to perform in marriages that infiltrated our day-to-day life. For a long time, it was too painful for me to look at the truth. Until it became too painful NOT to look at it.
It may come as no surprise that my marriage ended in a divorce. To be clear, it was not a divorce from the other person (ok technically it was), but rather a divorce from the behaviors I had of abandoning myself. I chose a road to recovery of reclaiming my voice, rekindling my desires, of putting myself first, of becoming the “bad” guy. This process is such an unraveling and is very disorienting as we question on a profound level, “who am I without all of these roles I have been assigned? What is my essence that has always been there and what expression does she have?”
If you are married now, it can be reconstructed if that is your desire. However, be really honest with yourself about why you got married and what you said yes to, both in your vows and also in the ways you were unconscious of. It is crucial. Once you are clear, have courageous conversations with your partner about these truths. It takes each of you to explore what your essence is and what you truly want to express. Challenge the co-dependent tendencies of wanting the other to take care of you and learn how to parent yourself. Tend to all of the ghosts of your past and recognize them for what they are, the past. Every day we get to choose who we want to be. Can you allow yourself the freedom to let go of self blame? Can you grant your partner the same state of grace and freedom? When we are willing to speak out loud what we truly desire and welcome it without fearing it as a threat, often times fear dissipates with the truth telling. In this way, we free ourselves and our partners to express who they are moment to moment knowing that it is not about us, but rather about the journey of ever expanding freedom of our soul’s expression. It is here we find true love. It is here that we can create a new model of sacred union worthy of being passed down to our children.
Dare to Desire!
Kristen