Thieves, Thieves, Tramps and Thieves: Part Two

Keeping the Faith: Marriage and Infidelity

I'm not ashamed to admit that Edward Norton's directorial debut, Keeping the Faith, is one of my favorite movies. This little diddy about a priest and a rabbi who fall in love with the same woman is just that: a sweet trifle about tolerance, friendship, and love.

Toward the end of the movie, father Brian Finn (Norton) goes to his elder, father Havel (a nice little cameo by Milos Foreman), for advice. Finn feels like he's betrayed god—that he should leave the priesthood because he fell in love with a woman. Foreman consoles him by saying, "I have been a priest for over 40 years, and I fell in love at least once every decade."

The point of this exchange is that priests make a higher commitment to God, but this commitment doesn't supplant their humanity. Turning away from a "normal" existence to face and serve god does not mean one (the self) ceases to exist. Rather, the challenge is to "keep the faith" in the face of temptation.

This scene is touching because it reinforces the idea that commitments are not immune from temptation but are, ultimately, worth adhering to (rejecting temptation) because they are lasting. What good is a commitment if it's not worth keeping?[1] To "fall in love at least once every decade" is momentary; to serve God is everlasting.

As a priest, father Finn gives up his right to fall in love, get married, and have sex with Jenna Elfman. He does this in order to serve God. This kind of sacrifice has meaning, has power. Why? Because God's love is deeply fulfilling, more so than the tenuous tremors of desire. True, love is not to be trifled with, but Finn has already committed himself to God—and so his love for Elfman's character is not (or would not be) true love. He has already given that to God.

Is marriage, then, not similar? In committing ourselves to our partners, do we not commit our true love to them? Anything that comes down the line after that is ultimately suspect, untrue.

The scene from Keeping the Faith further resonates because committing to a higher purpose is difficult. It requires a sacrifice—a self-sacrifice at that. I probably don't need to point out how most of us have issues with self-sacrifice…

But I will anyway: Bringing this down a few notches to the more mundane, I'll say that anyone who has made a New Year's resolution knows how hard it is to make a sacrifice. If it's so hard to commit to a new exercise schedule, or to stop eating pork, no wonder so many people have trouble remaining faithful in marriage!

Okay, so I just compared giving up pork for Lent to staying faithful to your spouse. I also implied that marriage requires a sacrifice. Some might take offense to that, but let me clarify: We make sacrifices when we choose to marry. Just as Father Finn gives up his right to follow through with his desires, those of us who are married sacrifice single life for the greater cause of a relationship. Most of these sacrifices, truth be told, might better be classified as simple trade-offs. In fact, many would prefer calling them "trade-offs" to sacrifices because "trade-off" makes marriage seem more like a business transaction. Like buying a car…

But in order for a real marriage to exist, a real sacrifice must occur. And it's the big one: self-sacrifice. Don’t get me wrong. Self-sacrifice doesn't negate remaining true to ourselves. We must (constantly) strive to maintain that balance.

So the tenor of my prose so far is riddled with "commitment" and "sacrifice." I even led this bit off by referencing a film about a priest and a rabbi…

What gives?

More than being bugged by the haphazard use of "whore" in lambasting Eliot Spitzer, I've been unnerved by the repercussions of his infidelity across marriage discourse. Since the incident, I have heard very, very little positive commentary regarding marriage and fidelity. Not only did we have the newly installed governor of New York shopping out his laundry list of infidelities, and the ex-governor of New Jersey letting us in on his ménage a trois, but NPR ran a few bits on how political sex scandals are nothing new, and I even caught part of an hour long radio show devoted to investigating the reasons behind public figures and their sexual foibles.

The most unsettling bit, though, came from Two Guys Named Chris on Rock 92. Deidre announced that of all her married friends, not a single couple had escaped the ravages of infidelity. Hearing this a 7:30 in the morning, after having climbed out of bed with my darling wife, I was horrified.

Is it really that hard to maintain fidelity in marriage?!

I spent the rest of that day mulling over the various marriages I've been privy to in my life… Suffice to say, the outlook was dim.

Why am I so shaken by all this? Well, I've been married for two years. I love my wife, and I recognize and accept—at my core—everything that I've pointed out above about sacrifice, commitment, faith and true love.

I've committed myself to my wife. I've made that sacrifice. She has, too.

But…

Will our marriage withstand the damaging cyclone of our treacherous, poisonous culture?

All signs point to "Yes."

But we certainly won't be able to find much refuge in the world around us…

Let me go back to these comments: "Self-sacrifice doesn't negate remaining true to ourselves. We must (constantly) strive to maintain that balance." It might be argued that social and political positions ravage relationships due to the stressors inherent in the jobs. The "self" in these positions is under constant barrage; having to maintain a public persona amidst the daily complications of any committed relationship must be daunting. Add to this the sheer logistics of public life: One would rarely, I imagine, have much "me time," or time for self-reflection/release.

But to counter this, I'm reminded of Joseph Campbell's discussion of the "tyrant-monster" in The Hero With A Thousand Faces:

The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world's messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.

Ultimately, Campbell points out, "the hero is the man of self-achieved submission."[2] Does this not sound like my earlier comments regarding self-sacrifice? Once committed to the higher cause (in my mind, I would rather call this a twinned spiritual transcendence/obeisance since our lives are a journey toward greater understanding and service), once set upon our hero quest, we must acknowledge/accept the loss of innocence—which here I will equate with accepting social responsibility in lieu of puerile pleasures.

I’m reminded, too, of a bit I saw on the news last night. An English professor (imagine that!) at Wake Forest University has just published a book about the value of unhappiness. Dr. Wilson's book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, seems to come at a time when we might recoil in horror. After all, the world is falling apart around us! We need more more more happiness, not less!

But Wilson writes, "Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. . . . It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty."

And that's the big lie.

Or at least the advertiser's dream: We huddle in scared masses after watching the nightly news and eat Papa John's pizza until we're sedated, or we lie in bed riddled with insomnia thinking about how we're going to face the next day, week, month—getting so frustrated that we eventually reach for the Ambien.

But it's all a carefully woven web of product placements. Actually, I take that back. It's a massive, unwieldy behemoth that threatens to suffocate us with paranoia! For the love of God, consume!

The end result is obvious: We don't know whether or not we're supposed to be happy, so we just amble through life hoping we get something right. Or we give up entirely and rely solely on the pleasure principle.

And that's how I'll cycle back to marriage and infidelity: The competing forces at work in all our lives threaten to dismantle our internal compasses. Right and wrong have been co-opted by multi-media conglomerates and Pizza Hut. Our free market capitalism moves ever closer to hegemonic monopoly. We can even buy church stickers for our cars, announcing to all passers-by that we're saved no matter what traffic laws we break.

And marriage? Let's face it, allowing gays to marry is the least of our worries in regards to maintaining sanctity in the institution. We've got voyeurism, exhibitionism, escort services, Internet porn, and a smorgasbord of pharmaceuticals to wrestle with.

In the end, we have ourselves to wrestle with.

And there you have it. Regardless of my whining and dithering, it all comes back to personal responsibility. Each of us decides. The only real roadblocks are ignorance and selfishness. If you're too stupid to break free (mentally/morally) from a dysfunctional, market-driven culture, then the odds are certainly not in your favor. If you are smart enough to recognize, "Hey wait a minute. Don't I have integrity?" and still choose transgression, well then. No need for me to continue.

I'll finish with a long quote from Joseph Campbell. Why? Because it all comes back to Campbell:

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family. But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life—that is the lure, the promise and terror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within.

Okay. I can't end with that. Why? Because it seems that the bent of this entire blog is all toward sacrifice and blah blah blah. What about the fact that—hello—marriage isn't a bad thing!

All this stuff hinges on one key presupposition: That surely one cannot be happy in marriage. While we might not admit this so baldly, it is there (underneath the discarded clothes and bills). The idea is that somewhere down the road (a year from now, five, ten, thirty) being married to the same person just won't be fun (any more). And let's face it, that stuff I mentioned above about consumerism feeds on the notion that marriage is ultimately disappointing. We must have products in place to backfill our transgressions! "The wife will be upset about me going out with the boys, so I better buy her something shiny!"

I repeat: Is marriage so bad?!

I can say, from my own experiences, that the answer to that question is a resounding "NO!"

Why?!

Because the problems in my life and, conjointly, the problems in my wife's life, aren't inherent to or symptomatic of our relationship. "Happiness" is not the goal of life. Why should it be the goal of marriage? Think back to the points that Dr. Wilson makes in his book. Unhappiness and happiness are both essential to existence—married or otherwise.

As such, it is deeply problematic to blame marriage for something that is indicative of life in general! Frankly, after all this writing, I'm inclined to believe that it all boils down to this is: Marriage is an all too convenient scapegoat for unhappiness. It is not the cause, but it takes the blame.

I am not prepared to accept this blunder in regards to my own marriage. That may sound naïve, but what can I say, I love my wife. Happy or unhappy, that one fact will never change.

That felt good to say. Let me end with it: I love my wife.

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[1] I'm reminded of America's "commitment" to Iraq. We presuppose that a commitment is made in good faith and is justified by all parties included. It logically follows that those parties would maintain the commitment in the face of conflict. However, navigating the unexpected complications (not all of which, in regards to my argument above, would classify as temptations) of any engagement/experience does not mean that the answer is "stay the course." Sometimes things change and even the best of commitments must adapt.

[2] Campbell also notes, "virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites. Virtue quells the self-centered ego and makes the transpersonal centeredness possible; but when that has been achieved, what then of the pain or pleasure, vice or virtue, either of our own ego or of any other? Through all, the transcendent force is then perceived which lives in all, in all is wonderful, and is worthy, in all, of our profound obeisance." Clearly, there is a point at which our experiences may transcend traditional thinking. This is not, however, a reprieve or "get out of jail free" card for political officials. Rather, the self-centeredness inherent in being an official denotes less likelihood (potentially) of achieving a "culminating insight."