When you are dating you are very careful about what you say. Your language is gushing and complimentary. You’re in awe of your partner, spending hours on the phone, snatching any piece of conversation you can.
Then you get married.
After the wedding and honeymoon debriefs are over life settles into routine. The conversation becomes about logistics, bills, trash, cleaning, cooking, in-laws and out-laws dynamics, your space and my space. At the end of a hard day silent absorption in individual screen time is all you have energy for.
Harvard professor Stanley Cavell in his ’Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage’ asserts that ‘happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage’. Rather than the hurried stanza of courtship stalling in silent exhaustion, marriage opens up the opportunity for compelling communion. Somehow we've got to find or choose ways to keep the conversation going with our spouse.
I once read a blog comment from an anonymous widow who described her
husband's death after 44 years of marriage as him being taken from her
in the middle of a fascinating sentence. Beautiful. This is my longing for my marriage: that The Beloved and I would always want to hang on each other's sentences; that we would never tire of the stories we've heard numerous times before; and that we'd always cherish the open spaces to dream.
Robert Louis Stephenson described marriage as:
‘ One long conversation, checkered by disputes. Two persons more and more adapt
their notions one to suit the other and in process of time, without sound of trumpet,
they conduct each other into new worlds of thought. ’
May you find new worlds with your spouse through your fascinating tender conversations.
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