My wife and I will soon celebrate eight years married–and, to our minds just as significant, 13 years together. I shudder to think where I might have ended up in this life without Doris in it. She keeps me sane…I mean that fairly literally.  

Over the last few months, my wife and I have attended the (second, as it happens) weddings of two of my oldest friends. During a toast at the most recent of these events, I said: “This is a hard world. So whenever people find love with one another, when they meet someone to hold and to be held by, it is a great thing. Maybe the greatest thing we humans do.”  

I mention all this not because I suffer under the illusion you care about my biography. Rather, I want to underscore that when I finally get around to declaring, in some forthcoming post, my opposition to marriage as a state-sanctioned institution, I am neither attacking love or commitment, nor am I condemning those who wish to declare and celebrate their lives together before friends and family. As I say, love is perhaps the greatest thing we do.

And also the hardest, as my friend Mike Ireland noted on his album Try Again: “Even when it’s true, love’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do.”

The reason, one reason anyway, for the extreme difficulty of promising to love and to hold, in good times and in bad, is that, by definition, none of us can possibly know what we’re getting in to. “For in joining ourselves to another, we join ourselves to the unknown…,” Wendell Berry wrote in his essay “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms”:

Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party can be solely in charge. What you think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you–and marriage, time, life, history, and the world–will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.

***** 

Like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about marriage a great deal lately because of the so-called Defense of Marriage ammendment, recently defeated in the Senate, and also because of the many like-minded state ammendments that have already passed, such as the one here in Missouri and the one just across the state line in Kansas. Or the one passed earlier this month in Alabama, the twentieth of its kind. (Eleven additional state ammendments are in the offing, according to the Heritage Foundation; you can find a complete list of which states have what laws, here.)

But it’s also been on my mind because of the weddings I’ve recently attended–and because of the fellow attendees at both events who, simply because they are gay or lesbian, aren’t allowed to marry one another, even if they wanted to. The arguments supporting this bigotry are few and weak. Our friend Dallas Clemons, at Way Down in the Hole, recently dealt with the main objections in a June 4th post entitled “What Is This Thing Called Love?”

As Dallas notes, among the biggest objections cited to deny homosexuals the right to marry one another is that old English 101 fallacy, the slippery slope. Slippery slope arguments–if we do this thing, then it’s only a matter of time before we do this other worse thing–are frequently deployed to warn of impending moral ruin. Yet it’s precisely on moral terms that the arguments fail: They downplay, or dismiss altogether, the human ability–the defining human ability, I’d say–to make moral choices in the first place, to decide to draw the line here, not there.

The capacity to say “I do,” coupled with the comprehension of what such a declaration entails, would seem to be one pretty solid dividing line between those who can marry and those who can’t. That’s why, slippery slopers to the contrary, legalizing gay marriage needn’t necessarily lead people next to tying the knot with their pets or getting hitched to their cars. An Acura can’t say “I do,” and dogs, even the very cute ones we might train to bark on cue during a ceremony, don’t know their nuptials from a Nylabone.

All this slippy slopery also ignores that slopes can slip in more than one direction. Think state-sanctioned gay marriage may be a first step toward polygamy? OK. But an ammendment against gay marriage might be a step toward, say, the reinstatement of miscegenation laws, or the denial of marriage licenses to those who don’t avow a desire to reproduce, or…insert your favorite nightmare scenario here.

Of course, the favorite slippery slope nightmare of those who oppose gay marriage is Big Love, formally know as polygamy. That needn’t necessarily be the case (see the above), but I can see why opponents make the case. So, next up, I want to think out loud a bit about the possibility of group marriage.  

*****

I’m most interested here in this post, and in all of my posts really I guess, in considering the joys and hard work that walk hand in hand with comitted love. As Margaret Atwood says in her story/essay “Happy Endings,”  honest endings are always the same–”John and Mary die”–and “beginnings are always more fun.” But “true connoisseurs…,” she says, “are known to favor the stretch in between,” that road where one of the few things we know for certain is that we don’t know where we’re going.

Below are six tracks that I believe speak with generosity, honesty, and wisdom about that hard, and great, stretch in between. Talk to you soon.

Tony Bennett “How Do You Keep the Music Playing” from The Art of Excellence (Columbia, 1986)

Ray Charles “Come Rain or Come Shine” from The Genius of Ray Charles (Atlantic, 1959)

The Five Keys “The Glory of Love” available on The Aladdin Years (Collectables, 1995)

Mike Ireland “Love’s the Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do” from Try Again (Ashmont, 2002)

Charlie Rich “Life’s Little Ups and Downs” from The Fabulous Charlie Rich (Epic, 1969)

Bruce Springsteen “Tunnel of Love” from Tunnel of Love (Columbia, 1987)

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