I want to say more about my recommendation that you not over-focus on the question of whether or not to stay in your relationship. This is just another way to look at it, and to do this I’ll say a little bit about my own story:

A little over ten years ago, I started seeing someone. We moved through the usual stages or phases of an early relationship, with all the ups and downs you might expect, until in 2003 we, well, “tied the knot.” (Our marriage, alas, is not yet recognized by the state. But that’s another story.) Since 2003, we’ve continued to build our life together, making lots of decisions you’ll recognize in your own life and relationships: should we get a dog? (yes); should we get another dog? (yes); should we get another dog? (yes); should we have children? (no); should we live near either of our families in Arizona and Minnesota? (no)… and so on. This is life in a long-term committed relationship. And right now, as we close in on eleven years together and I prepare for my 40th birthday next month, I can tell you: I’m happy.

But—there have been some losses. Some of the decisions we made (and no, the list above is not exhaustive) didn’t go in the direction I wanted. Sometimes we’ve made decisions together that have led me to feel a deep pang of loss. “If I were on my own,” I’d tell myself, “I wouldn’t do this.” Often in my work with clients, people come to counseling bearing the wounds of these losses. Or they come with anticipatory anxiety about the losses they’ll suffer if they hook up with a person, or stay with a person.

And here’s my latest take on all of this. First, the losses you’ve suffered—and will suffer—are real, and they are painful. No question. I won’t insult you by trying to minimize what you’ll lose if you decide to go a certain way in your life, career, or relationship. You will lose something. And most often that loss will really sting. So… why do it? Here’s why (if you ask me). Whatever I’ve decided in my life—over the past ten years with my partner, and in the years before that—and whether or not I’ve been conscious of this, I have always wanted to be happy, to have delightful experiences, to join with another person in ecstatic union (sexual and otherwise), to laugh, to love, to be loved… in short, I’ve always wanted my life on this planet to be wonderful.

And now that I’m pushing 40 (and pushing it hard), I’m finding that whatever choices I make, whether they’re thought through and careful, whimsical and adventurous, or just plain stupid (!), I always have a shot at the happiness I want. If I had chosen differently ten years ago, six years ago, two years ago, or yesterday, I would not be with my partner right now, and that would have been a loss. Ten years ago, it would have been a lost opportunity. Yesterday or two years ago or six years ago, it would have been deeply sad and life-changing. But even then, I would have had a shot at the happiness I want, just as much as I do now, with my partner but without some of the things I’ve lost along the way while deciding to be with this one person.

So… it all comes down to this: if you’re deeply torn about what to do because you know that either choice is going to be painful, can you also see that, no matter what choice you make (even if it’s a, well, bonehead stupid one!), you can still find the happiness you want? After all, you’ll always have yourself, no matter what you choose. And you have a lot of say in what you do with yourself, no matter where you choose to take your life, and no matter where life takes you.

Does this open up the topic and clarify things a bit more? If not, I’d love to hear your comments and questions.

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For a long time I’ve been thinking about wedding vows and how they can be a well-intentioned but problematic way to begin a marriage/partnership. I’ve tried to come up with a wedding vow that not only promises lifelong fidelity, but lifelong growth and maturity–even if that growth might lead to the end of the relationship.

Practically speaking, this is probably just a little mental exercise for me, an attempt to write a wedding vow that would never actually be taken by someone. I say this because weddings and union ceremonies are highly emotional events, and the couple in question invariably wants to emphasize the “until death do we part” theme. On a wedding day, nobody wants to think about the things you go to couples counseling to work on. And often enough, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some couples seem to be made for each other, and their wedding-day bliss makes for a great opening scene to a long and nourishing life together.

But most couples–and I count myself in this group–go through the ordinary developmental crises that intimate relationships face: the need for both persons to grow and mature; the difficulties they face at different stages in their lives; the ways they handle (or mishandle) anxiety, anger, distrust, and discord; and the inevitable ups and downs of sex, money, in-laws, kids, careers, substance use, and…well, you get the idea. For me, phrases like “in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer” just don’t cut it.

So here goes: my attempt at a wedding vow that gets a little closer to what I think a healthy marriage/partnership is. I’ll start with two examples of typical vows, then offer my own.

Here’s a traditional vow that most people hear at most weddings (particularly in the movies): “I take you, _____, to be my _____, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.”

That’s your basic vow–short and eloquent, with the usual polarities (healthy/sick, rich/poor). One concern, though: it doesn’t say much about the inevitable difficulties couples face in the dynamics of a typical relationship, and I wonder if more marriages would last if the couple had words for what they would do if their relationship were in real trouble. This vow is short and elegant, but to a fault. It doesn’t say enough.

Here’s the vow I took in a blessing ceremony with my partner in 2003: “I, _____ give myself to you, _____, and these things I promise you: I will be faithful to you and honest with you; I will respect, trust, help, and care for you; I will forgive you as we have been forgiven; and I will share my life with you, through the best and worst of all that is to come, until death parts us.”

That’s better. It assumes there will be conflict (“I will forgive you…”), it stresses the importance of honesty and respect, and it drops the usual “sickness/health” language for “the best and worst of all that is to come,” which to my ears rings with a deeper wisdom.

But I still think we’re not there yet. Here’s my first stab at a vow that might bear the “Therapist Seal of Approval”: “I, _____ offer myself to you, _____, and these things I promise you: in times of rejoicing, I will celebrate with you; in times of sorrow, I will weep with you. When we fight, I will be honest with you; when I am wrong, I will seek your forgiveness. I will strive to share with you a life of respect, trust, growth, and love, through the best and worst of all that is to come, until death parts us.”

Hmm… I think that’s better. For starters, I like “I offer myself to you” more than “I give myself to you.” It implies the freedom of the other person to say, “No, thanks” to my giving of myself, and even though this is really not the best moment to do that, it’s healthy for couples to remember that they are freely offering themselves to one another, and freely choosing not to say No to the offer. This vow also assumes that not only will there be conflict, but that the person taking the vow will sometimes be wrong.

And finally, that last line: “I will strive to share with you…” That’s the line that I think would be hard for couples to say to each other. There’s an obvious (and big!) loophole: striving to do something isn’t the same as simply doing it. If I promise to strive, that implies that I could decide at some point that it won’t work, and the striving isn’t worth it. It’s the kind of thing a hospital might tell a patient: “We will strive to save your life…” If the patient dies, well, the hospital still strived. It also sounds a little klutzy, I think. It sounds like the kind of language you hear in Therapyland.

But I can’t figure out a better way to take a healthy wedding/partnership vow. There are millions of well-intentioned, good people in the world who take the traditional vow and wind up divorced. And because they assumed all along that they both made promises of unconditional fidelity, it’s hard to see the divorce as anything but a dismal failure. But many divorces are actually the healthiest option for the couples in question. Can you imagine a few scenarios in which divorce is the better choice? I’m sure you can. Again, it’s probably in bad taste to raise these issues on a wedding day. Lots of people would probably be superstitious about it–that if you talk about it, you’re tempting fate. But I maintain that a healthier vow makes for a healthier marriage.

As for the klutzy language, all I can say is, I’m working on it!

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Lately I’ve been reflecting on a story (or is it a legend?) from my own family history. If any of my siblings or cousins read this, please know: I don’t know how much actual historical truth there is in this story. I think the substance of the story is true. I’m fairly sure that if certain parts of the story didn’t actually happen, they at least were imagined by the persons involved. In any case, it’s a truthful story, if not a factually true one, and it led me into some insights that I think are useful. So…end of disclaimer!

Here’s the story.

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, my maternal grandfather was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. His wife—my grandmother—had been trained as a nurse when she was younger, so she came every day to his care center and helped the staff take care of him. At this point in his illness, he had forgotten her, and all the other members of his immediate family. But—and this part I know is true—he remembered his Mercedes. My grandfather was a successful businessman, and his good car was a source of pleasure and pride for him. For reasons passing understanding, he retained a memory of this car, even as his beloved family fell away from his awareness.

One day, after a few days of rainy weather, he turned to my grandmother—his wife—and said, “Nurse, can you make sure they put my Mercedes down there, on the opposite curb, so that I can see it when I look out this window? And can you make sure they wash and wax it?” My grandmother was a salty Irish mother, no taller than maybe five and a half feet. I can imagine her eyes narrowing as she heard this request. But she complied. She agreed to do this, and she went downstairs, drove home, took the Mercedes to the car wash, and parked it outside my grandfather’s window.

But before she did that, she drove the car to a street that—after the rains—had lots of mud along the roadside. She got out, went to the far side of the car, and kicked mud onto the clean doors and panels of the Mercedes. She took care to confine the mud to the side of the car her husband wouldn’t be able to see.

On one level, this story is a great joke. It’s a funny tale of my irreverent grandmother’s Irish temper, and her passive-aggressive response to her husband forgetting her. But as I reflect on the story, I think there’s more going on here. I think there’s something about the mud that speaks to her love for her husband, and her refusal to relinquish him to the inexorable darkness of his illness.

I think that her act of kicking mud onto the car was her way of insisting that there was some part of him that still belonged to her, and still knew her. It’s hard (if not impossible) to be truly angry at someone who is wholly unaware of your existence. You can have an abstract anger for someone you don’t know—for example, I spent eight years being angry at Dick Cheney—but the kind of anger that would inspire this muddy scenario is an intimate anger, a loving anger. If she had fully accepted the tragedy of his illness, and said her final goodbyes to him, she would not have acted on—or even felt—this anger. I think there was something resembling faith and love in this act of hers. She wasn’t going to fully let him go, not while he was still physically alive, and still interacting with her.

In short, if she had simply washed the car and parked it outside his window, I think she would have devolved into one of his nurses. He would have lost his wife, and she would have lost her husband.

I’ve worked with couples at all the different phases of the relationship cycle: new couples, couples married for 40 years, and couples in between. And I have two friends who have been married for (no kidding!) 62 years. Sometimes I think that my job is simple. My job is this: to help and support people who want someone in their life who will kick mud onto their Mercedes, and want to be the kind of person who would kick that mud. My grandmother’s comical Irish anger was actually (if you ask me) just another gift of love to her beloved spouse, another way to say to him, “I love you, dear one. I love you so much that I will reserve my deepest rage for you!”

I am thankful that I had a grandmother who threw mud on her husband’s car, right up to the very end.

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