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George Clooney’s whirlwind romance and nuptials are the cover of headline news everywhere this week. This morning, he was quoted saying “marriage feels pretty damn great.” On the outset, women and gay men everywhere swoon. Yet, on a deeper level - a red flag goes off in the mind’s of couples’ therapists everywhere.
The notion that someone could provide accurate commentary on marriage after only 24 hours of being in said marriage is tantamount to someone saying being a parent is “pure bliss,” after giving birth two days earlier.
I get it. Mr. Clooney was simply expressing his happiness to the world. However, the more accurate comment would have been “a wedding feels pretty damn great.”
I see couples in therapy every day, one bee lining it for the altar with blind urgency, all in the name of wanting to be “married,” when really they want a wedding. Who doesn’t want a week of friends and family fawning all over you, telling you how beautiful you are, how perfect you and your future spouse will be, how blessed you are, buying you gifts, making speeches about you, telling your funniest anecdotes, and describing in detail your best attributes, etc?
The marriage, however is a horse of a different color. Marriage is what happens when all the guests fly home. When the fresh flower petals start to wilt and the champagne runs dry. Marriage is the everyday, it is the mundane, it is the quiet moments only witnessed by one other person. Marriage is work. It is constantly remembering to put your best foot forward, when you’d rather be lazy and just bark out whatever you feel.
The beautiful element of the institution is that marriage provides a witness to one’s life. Someone that vows to stand by you, through thick and through thin, as witness to your life. When all is said and done, years go by, children have grown--there will be one person who said “you were here, we were here.”
The irony about marriage is that no one is ever quite ready to be married. Marriage makes us ready to be married, just as the act of parenting makes us more ready to be parents. Marriage is a beautiful, turbulent, exciting, surprising, growth-inducing, terrifying, irritating, thrilling ride, and if we can hold on long enough- it does start to feel pretty damn great.
Dr. Colleen Long is the author of Happiness in B.A.L.A.N.C.E; What We Know Now About Happiness as well as Meditation Medication. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and couples therapist with practices in Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach, California. You can follow her on twitter or facebook, or visit her website.
