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June Salon
Hi Everyone,
Summer is wedding season, so I thought I would do a Salon on the Marriage Archetype, which will give all of you a preview of the book I am writing on relationships. Enjoy....
Of the many associations people have with marriage, few if any ever think about marriage as one of the grand cosmic archetypes. But it is. I remember telling a young woman who had recently gotten engaged that she was about to enter into the "archetype of marriage". She gave me the most puzzled look, not surprisingly, and then said, "Why would I want to know that?"
I could not stop laughing. Of course, that was a perfect response. Why would she or any one benefit from knowing the archetypal intrigues hidden in marriage?
I said, "Well, if I told you that your life is going to change completely after you are married in ways you cannot imagine or control, all due to the subtle influence of the Marriage Archetype, would that change your mind?" Needless to say, I added that I was not attempting to scare her out of getting married, because this retelling of our conversation could give that impression. I was offering to provide her with insight about an inevitable shift in domestic atmosphere that would take within two years of marriage. She said that she would rather learn about marriage from her own experience. I wished her the best and left it at that.
But of course I knew that the Marriage Archetype would gradually recreate the psychic atmosphere in her and her husband's home environment within the first year or two of their marriage, reshaping it according to its iron clad patterns and traditions. Regardless of whether a couple marries in a church, a synagogue, before a judge, or on a beach, they are still inviting into their lives the Marriage Archetype through the archetypal ritual of marriage. And that, as I will now explain, is a cosmic ritual that has its roots not in love and romance but in tribal survival.
A Bit of Archetype History Never Hurt
Though marriage today for us is a romantic event, love bonds are not the origin of marriage or unions between men and women. Marriage or unions were matters of tribal survival. (Believe it or not, this information is more than pertinent to you, as the instinct to survive is your fundamental drive, so much so that many people will stay in horrible marriages precisely for reasons of survival. Very little, in other words, has actually changed except that we now have wedding cakes and photographers.)
Turning back the clock - and I mean way back - let us remember that the live spans of people were brief and bloody. The outside world was a constant threat. The leading cause of death for women was childbirth and when war or childbirth wasn't killing young men or women, disease or accidents and broken bones were. The point is that people "mated-married" early and often several times in order to keep life going. Romance was just not part of the program. Every one's days and nights were occupied by survival (food, clothing, shelter, children and family, and labor) and maintaining a connection of some sort to God. To imagine young men and women in the Twelfth, Thirteenth or even Seventeenth, or Eighteenth Centuries "dating" (or even the early Nineteenth) is absolutely ludicrous. First of all, where would they go on a date? And how would they get there? Dating, as such, simply did not exist as a concept because women did not have "choice".
Let us realize that in order for a woman to become selective about who she wants to marry, she first has to be prepared not to marry at all. She has to be able to take on the challenge of her own survival in a world that up until very, very recently barely paid equal wages and was not the most sympathetic to women raising children on their own. Unwed mothers were shunned, if not stoned, by many societies. They didn't stand a chance of survival. There was no such thing as "dating" until women felt a sense of social and financial breath space around them, which did not happen until after the Suffragette Movement. Until then, women of aristocratic means were used to advance the positions of their families through marriage. (I am speaking about a time period spanning 1600's to early 1900's, believe it or not. And further, variations of this management of the aristocracy continue to this day, though not quite as obvious.) But power marries power, as they say. And why? To preserve the tribe's inbred power structure. The marriage is primarily about power - not love. Though it sometimes happens that two people from power families actually do love each other, the commitment that holds their marriage together when it falters is the tribal power scheme. And, do you not hear stories all the time of how the powerless long to marry the powerful??? You think that's about love? Be serious. That's about survival. Period.
Lesser aristocrats had to rely upon family-to-family introductions or introductions within the social circle. The tradition of the "Coming Out" ritual represented a young woman's time had come to be formally presented into the social network. She was now available for "courting". Men interested in pursuing a certain woman would have to ask permission of the father who would grant approval only if he saw that the young man had "good prospects". A father's duty was to insure that his daughters marry men who could take on their "care", as it was assumed that women could not survive on their own - certainly not proper women. Insuring that a man could support a family, let me emphasize, was the golden jewel. No doubt there are many stories about young men and women who fell in love and married or wanted to marry during these times. Of course there were. If not, Shakespeare would not have written, Romeo and Juliet.
But, alas, our infamous and beloved Romeo and Juliet die in the end because their respective tribes fear that a marriage of love will dilute the power of each other's tribes (aka Aristocratic Houses). One of the oldest questions in the world: Survival before love or love before survival?
Oh, there was one choice a Catholic aristocratic woman could make if she did not want to marry - she could become a nun. And believe it or not, many choose to enter the convent because of the promise of an education or at the very least, literacy. And further, the women knew they would avoid the perils of childbirth. Many convents during the 1500's, 1600's, and 1700's in parts of Western Europe were high centers of culture and spiritual discussions.
What about women who were not of the aristocracy and who did not have powerful fathers looking to ensure their daughters were properly married? What became of these women? Well, they married within their tribes as they could, just as the men did. Historic records are not filled with an abundance of ordinary love stories among feudal life. Individual love stories did begin to emerge during the 1800's, which you could think of as the Age of Romance. Certainly many of the great romantic novels were written during the Nineteenth Century such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Sense and Sensibility. The story line in each of these novels, of course, pits an aristocrat against a mere mortal: Will love win or that ever present need for financial security?
Marriage and Romance
Marriage enjoyed a period of high idealism following World War II. After the war, thousands of soldiers returned from the Pacific and European theaters of war eager to settle into normal family life. The atmosphere in America, however, was unlike any other time in its history in that World War II took America out of the depths of economic depression and catapulted it into a golden financial era. As a result, the America of the 1950's launched a fifty-year idealization of marriage unlike any other time in history.
The advent of television only served to support the idea of the perfect American family with programs like, Father Knows Best and My Three Sons as well as Walt Disney and the Magic Kingdom. America was all about the perfect marriage and family and magic (at least a part of America), beginning in the late 1950's. Of course, the radical soul of America was brewing underneath the surface, but in this piece, we are only interested in the parameters of the Marriage Archetype and how that particular archetype evolved socially within the American psyche.
We could say that the Marriage Archetype reached its apex during the 1950's - 1960's. The Homemaker-Mother came into fashion as men earned enough to support large families and support them in style. The "Donna Reed" television show and "Lassie" characterized ideal American family life to perfection: A secure home, a working father, an at-home mother, and two happy children. Owning a home became a part of the marriage dream package, although home ownership was already woven into American social consciousness in a big way. Financial security, however, took on a whole new meaning as a genuine Middle Class Aristocracy gradually evolved during these years. Weddings went from "at home" celebrations or local restaurant dinners to huge catered events. The occupation of Wedding Planners eventually sprung up toward the late 1980's. Million dollar celebrity marriages made the news. Hollywood films exploited the idea of romance and marriage, raising the "expectation" bar on expectations and outcomes of married life. The Perfect Marriage became a theme for the first time in the American culture in a commercial way as well as a product of the entertainment industry.
With all this magic then, one has to wonder how it is that simultaneously the divorce rate in society was skyrocketing along side the rise of the glamorous wedding. One has to ask two significant questions, "What's the problem here?" And, "What makes for a good marriage these days?"
The Consciousness of the Marriage Archetype
Few adages are as familiar as; "You don't know someone until you live with them." That little bit of wisdom should actually read, "You don't know someone until you marry the person," because it's the Marriage Archetype that contains the psychic alchemy that actually transforms the relationship energy between a couple.
I repeat again that the Marriage Archetype is an archetype that is rooted in survival and not romance or love. Though love may indeed be a part of why two people marry, people also partner in order to survive the journey of life together. And when times get tough in a marriage, as they always do, people hang together because their survival is intertwined with the other person. Again, though love may still be an active ingredient in the relationship, tough times often diminish if not deplete one's capacity to feel love for their significant other. At the end of the day, most people hang in there because their home is still there "secure" place, regardless of how love-less it has become. As so many people have discovered, security on the home front is a difficult thing to walk away from, especially when small children are involved.
That said, let's explore how relationships before marriage seem to enter a different psychic field once vows are exchanged. I know so many stories of people who have told me that their regrets began even on their wedding day. One woman told me that she cried her whole wedding night because she knew she had made the mistake of her life. I asked her, "Surely you realized before your wedding day that you did not want to marry that man," to which she replied, "My mother kept telling me that he was going to be successful and that I would learn to love him."
As it turned out, he was not all that successful and they ended up divorced. It took fifteen years and to their credit, both people gave the marriage their best shot. It's interesting to note that the divorce was initiated when the wife had discovered a sense of her own self-esteem, which in turn led her to pursue an occupation in the field of healing. The combination of feeling good about herself and discovering the world of healing arts helped her to thrive among an interesting and vastly creative community of people. Life indeed teaches us all again and again that making panic choices that appear in life to offer us a safety net come at a ruthless cost to our soul.
Marriage is an archetype that brings out security conscious needs that two people often did not know that had prior to being married. That is, once a mortgage and children are involved in a couple's life, the freedom and carefree days of the dating years have to transition to the responsible years of bill paying and child care. Many people are not prepared to make that transition and it leads to an atmosphere of resentment. I have heard so many stories from women about how their husbands grew to resent the daily grind of having to work just to pay bills. They all reported some version of how their husbands felt as if all they had signed up for was life on a hamster wheel of work, paying bills, and evenings in front of the television. Young mothers, on the other hand, have shared that staying at home with their children made them feel as if they were wasting the best career years of their life. They did not regret having their children, but they did resent that it was costing them their career whereas their husbands got the benefit of both family and career. (Are you kidding me?) And Marriage itself is an entity - a third party, so to speak - that also requires care and attention. Just because two people finally got married does not assure the couple by any means that the marriage is going to work. The archetype itself requires a type of constant psychic attention.
In the old days, those days before we put so much value on indulging in our "own" needs, people knew how to attend to their marriages in a far more organic way. To say this differently, individuals were not so self-obsessed. Today we have a list that goes from here to there with tasks and busy work and things we want or need to do that have us running around in our lives like crazy people. We are constantly connected to the Internet that exists like a third person in our lives, a type of "intimate other". We have become accustomed to attending to our own emotional needs as a priority, not realizing that so has the person you have married. Between the two of you, that's a house full of emotional needs, busy schedules, and a lot of Internet connections. If I told you how many marriages I know of that have ended divorce because of relationships made through the Internet, you would think I was exaggerating, but truly, I am not. The number has exceeded one hundred, but that's just in my workshop universe. (And imagine all the people who are not telling me their stories.) While I am hardly opposed to self-care, extremes are another matter and we are a society in the "all about me" extreme zone. An "all about me" person and marriage is just not a good fit.
What Marriage Requires
The bottom line is that Marriage is an archetype that requires time and attention of the "other" in order to thrive. And further, it requires that the couple think of the "marriage" itself as an entity with its own inherent traditions and value structures that are not likely to change. To wit, though we might like to update this ancient archetype a bit, the core ingredients are there to stay. You want to make a marriage work, then understand the archetype at its core:
Marriage means fidelity - period. You may think you can have a liberal dating policy or an open sexual relationship, but get married and I promise you, you will resent it. You need to be willing to honor vows of fidelity or risk knowing that your partner never really will get over the wound - regardless of therapy. Here's a fact to keep in mind: Couples take a wedding vow not to promise to love each other for the rest of their lives - that's nonsense. You vow not to betray your partner with someone else when difficulties arise. That's what the vow represents. If you want a sexual open door policy, then don't get married. Live together and get regular medical check ups because it's not a healthy world out there.
Marriage automatically makes you more conscious of your basic survival needs: Security, home, being taken care of, and thus, feeling vulnerable in life, especially growing old together. Recognize that both parties have to participate in maturing financially as well as in sharing all matters related to building a life together. Trust takes on a whole new meaning when you are actually building a life together. If you can't be trusted, don't get married until you get right with yourself. Untrustworthy partners destroy everything.
Cherish your marriage as well as your spouse. These days, people are accustomed to valuing their "own space" while also claiming they want to be "in relationship". If you are someone who wants everything on your own terms, do every one a favor and stay single. You are better off and quite frankly, you'll be far happier. Two people who want their own space actually don't know it, but they like their freedom far more than compromise. They have crossed a type of character Rubicon, becoming more concerned about their own needs than they are about another person's needs. The emphasis on getting one's own needs met has evolved into a type of personal right or entitlement and two people believing that their own needs are a priority will never yield to the requirements of the Marriage archetype; namely cooperation, compromise, and mutual support.
Time. Marriage requires the investment of your time. I have listened to so many couples remark that they "schedule" special time together precisely because life moves so fast and can get so congested with irritating small things that every hour suddenly gets filled. The Marriage Archetype is a jealous mistress, so to speak, and it requires constant reassurance that all is well. My father was a banker and because his bank was open on Saturday, the bank was closed on Wednesdays. So my parents went on outings every Wednesday their entire married life. It was "their" day. Sometimes they would go for long drives in the country to try a new restaurant and other times they would go see old friends. But every one knew that they spent Wednesdays together. If your life gets too busy for your marriage, your marriage will disintegrate - end of story.
You have to value the survival of your marriage as an entity itself. Being "married" has to actually mean something to you other than "togetherness". That romantic notion is exactly what evaporates when "life" sets in. Marriage has to represent that you have agreed to serve in the capacity of "witness" to your spouse's life journey, and that is an arduous role to play, as life is never simple or easy or without it's surprises.
After All This - A Dose of Reality Yet Again
All this is fine and wondrous counsel, but a few more words of advice that fall under the category of "common sense reality" should be added:
The Marriage archetype functions best when you partner with someone of equal consciousness. It doesn't matter what archetypes another person has. We attract the people we do because of our archetypal magnets, naturally, but also because of the quality of consciousness that we radiate through our archetypal patterns. Two people can have the Artist archetype, for example, but each one can be very different - one grounded and mature, for example and the other completely irresponsible. Choose a partner on equal footing. Marriage is not a journey of compensation or healing. You do not marry someone (nor does someone marry you) with the intention of making you better or healing your wounds. That is a sure set up for a passive-aggressive atmosphere and divorce court.
The Marriage archetype thrives when two people pull their own weight within their roles. Sorry to sound a bit sexist here, folks, but it's the truth. Women want to feel that they can count on an income-producing husband/partner regardless of whether they are also professionals. And men want their wives to be good mothers and - yes - good in the kitchen. Now here, I know I may be treading on tender ground, so let me just put it out there: How many of you ladies have no interest whatsoever in whether your husband or partner works? My guess is that no one wants a free loader for a husband/partner. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. It's in a person's best interest to see a person clearly before putting on a wedding ring. A person full of excuses before marriage will have ten times as many after the marriage. Again, that's the type of imbalance that leads to divorce court.
While you can count on love for a lot of things, you can trust your common sense more. Love is blind; common sense is clear a cloudless sky. Marriage is about survival. Ask yourself, "Can I survive difficulties with this person? Does this person cave into fear most of the time? Does this person have any faith? Is this person an addict? Is this person honest? Does this person have the capacity to endure disappointments? Is this person realistic or a dweller in fantasy?" Sorry to be so hard-hitting, but you aren't going on a shopping spree with someone you are going to marry. You are committing your life to them and they need to have what it takes to be worthy of such a commitment. Likewise, so do you.
Finally, allow me to add a not-so-romantic comment on the magic of love. Many people believe that love survives all crises, but I will let divorce statistics speak for themselves. Love is not enough. Love needs to be blended with common sense, wisdom, practicality, and maturity. You need to know the stuff you are made of and whether you have what it takes to cherish - truly cherish - another person. And further, you need to know whether you want something - namely a marriage - enough to change your life and allow your life to keep changing, as the demands of the marriage require. You have no idea what the future holds. None of us do. But if any of us - regardless of whether we marry or not, actually - hold on to the future we want rather than flow with the future as it unfolds, we will destroy the one unfolding in front of us.
Have a lovely month, every one. And let me invite all of you to participate in my on-line Summer School program entitled, Reflections. Look for the details below.
Reflections Link
Love,
Caroline
Marriage As Archetype/ By Caroline Myss / Copyright 2013
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