At The Gates

Marriage can be hell.

 

In Catholic theology Hell is not really so much a place as it is a state of being. Hell, say the theologians, is an absence of God, which is to say, an absence of love in our lives. Hell is a definitive self-exclusion from love. If it is a place, it is the place where we are when we have become so centered on ourselves that we have cut love completely out of our lives.

 

In spite of the many popular culture references both  modern and medieval that describe Hell as a place to which you are condemned by God’s judgment due to your bad behavior, the teaching of the church is that we put ourselves in that dark lonely place. We are called over and over throughout our lives to love, and each time we hear that call we make a choice: to will our own good or to will the good of the other. To act selfishly or to act with love.

 

The more we answer the call to love ourselves rather than another, the more we lose the ability to practice love until in the end we find we can't do it at all.

 

Dante’s Divine Comedy, which takes the author on a journey through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven, is a brilliant epic poem about the quest for love, Dante conceives of Hell as a great cavern of vast concentric circles, gloomy and dark and cold save for a few areas where fires are used to torture lost souls. Each circle is filled with those who cut themselves off from love by committing particular sins that can be ultimately grouped together, roughly, as falling under one of the seven deadly sins.

 

At the very center, imprisoned in the ice created by his own freezing pride is a gigantic Satan, futilely beating his great bat wings and sending gusts of cold air up and through the great cavern of Hell.

 

Hell, in Dante's poem, is made up of people who got what they sought. They sacrificed love to lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath and pride, and ended up trapped in bleak worlds composed entirely of other people who made those same selfish choices. The marriages we describe are hellish because the couples are trapped in spiritual dysfunctions, choosing the apparent safety of self over the risk of selflessness.

 

The scenarios presented in this section describe spiritually dysfunctional families--although as you will see, economic, social and psychological dysfunctions often follow when marriages lack a spiritual vision or goal.

 

How do we end up in hell?  How do we go from falling in love to falling to pieces?

 

The descent into Hell is a great downward spiral that begins when we start treating our beloved as an object for meeting our own needs. We trade our love for lust, our passion to give everything we’ve got for comfortable routines, our generosity for pride. One day we may suddenly realize how far we have descended. Suddenly it all seems too much. “What was I thinking?” we ask ourselves.

 

Remember the axiom “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”? Many people in marriage seem to experience this within a year or so of their wedding day.  In many ways this is the most difficult stage in a marriage because it is here that you experience the largest let down.

 

How far is it to go from bliss to disillusionment as the mundane realites of daily living sets in?

 

All the little things start to bother you, from stinky morning breath, to underwear hanging over the shower rod, lack of privacy, quirky bedtime rituals, leaving dishes in the sink, stacking bags of garbage at the door. You realize that there are many, many differences between you. You wonder how you ever thought you were kindred spirits. You're confused, you argue about everything. And as it dawns on you that you made a lifelong commitment, you suddenly pale at the thought of that long, long, long road stretching out before you.

 

And all the while you are at odds with your once presumed soul mate, you are continually in need of making all sorts of mutually agreed upon decisions with them– where to live, when to have children, who will be the stay-at-home parent, or will both of you work, how to divvy up household chores, who will pay the bills, how to spend free-time, who will do the cooking, and just what do we do with the in-laws?

 

Spouses feeling so at odds with one another may find it next to impossible to pull out the old team spirit. The next decade or so is spent trying to get their partner to change.

 

If you thought the struggle for independence from your parents was huge, it is nothing compared to this.  You will work every angle to try to turn your partner into the person you want or need them to be. You will try to have your own way, insisting there are only two ways of looking at things – your spouse's way and the right way. Couples will tenaciously cling for years to the zero-sum game of making their partner admit they were wrong.

 

No wonder fifty percent of American couples--and that includes Catholic couples who aren't supposed to believe in divorce--decide they have done everything they can to no avail and throw in the towel.

 

They tell themselves that they have fallen out of love, or married a person who is wrong for them, as they divorce. Another portion of the married will resign themselves to the status quo and decide to lead separate lives while remaining married.

 

In the next eight chapters, we will profile marriages that epitomize couples whose self-interests lead them into Hellish marriages. Often they know their marriages are messed up, but they can’t quite articulate how, or figure out how they got there. And because one (or sometimes both) are reluctant to change themselves (usually insisting that it's their partner who must change), they find themselves trapped in a prison of their own making.