Water into Wine

A loose sketch I did from a YouTube video on learning how to urban sketch. I like how whimsical it turned out. 

 Frederich Buechner wrote in Whistling in the Dark that a good marriage is like Jesus’s miracle of the water into wine: a transmutation from one thing to another thing.

You can’t stay the same as you were before and have a good marriage, there has to be, among other things,  growth toward a common entanglement. 

I know I know, we mustn’t marry in order to accommodate someone else’s vision of ourselves and we mustn’t marry in order to change another person into our vision of who they should be. 

Agreed.
 

That is a recipe for disaster. I have witnessed many of these disasters befall my friends and family. 

Yet, a true marriage—one that honors the individual needs and dreams of both people—does change us. And if it’s a good marriage we become more of who we are (more wine-like) with them than we would without them.

I have a good marriage. I was too young and way too immature to understand how good my husband was. I lucked out. I brought a train-car of dysfunctional luggage into the union. 

Following Buechner’s analogy, I was room-temperature tap water: Bewildered, frightened, defensive, cocky, with random bursts of caring and loving, I needed someone like I got: infinitely patient and consistent. 

I’m a big believer in the Misery Index: we tend to change only when our current state has become so miserable that the behaviors and thinking that—however dysfunctional—kept us seemingly SAFE no longer work or we finally realize the price is too high to continue.

That awful misery is the catalyst to change, to throw out old patterns and learn new. Marriage is full of this kind of misery. Therefore marriage is full of the necessary stimulants to change into something better. 

Obviously, that doesn’t always happen. When I read that roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce, I am surprised that the number is not higher. Out of the 50% who don’t divorce, how many are miserable? I don’t mean a temporary, growing-pains, kinds of misery. I mean years of being yoked to a person who doesn’t, and often isn’t capable, of loving you, of compromising; who bullies you, ignores you, abuses you emotionally and even physically. 

What misery is this?!! What is so fearful that staying seems a better choice? The common answer is the children. It’s not a bad answer as children take a huge walloping in divorces. And the very immature and narcissistic behaviors that lead to the end of the marriage can make the aftermath a continuing battleground of blood and senseless mayhem. 

But if the misery of marriage is becoming unbearable for you, you must understand that it’s becoming unbearable for the children too, though they may not have the tools to say or understand it.

My parents divorced when I was a teenager and I’ve often thought we’d have been much better off if my mother had divorced my father immediately after giving birth to me (the youngest.) That was a miserable marriage and an equally miserable childhood. Perhaps, the only thing worse than coming from a broken home is living in one. 

But that’s my story and it’s an individual story that doesn’t necessarily resonate to everyone’s experience. 

As I said, I lucked out in my marriage. Mostly without any real thought by me. The only thing I think I did right in picking a husband was to consciously find someone as unlike my father as possible. And my husband was and is. 

What misery I have endured in my marriage is about 95% what I brought into it and refused to deal with. But as I grew and my ability to see how destructive and senseless my coping mechanisms were, I slowly began to change. 

Water into wine. It’s a process, but one I am very grateful for.