Chapter 26: You Marry a Person
YOU MARRY A PERSON
FOURTH, you must remember that you marry a person. I put this fourth on the list, not first. I have come to treat the word person rather gingerly in recent years because it is so overused. I hear people talk of wanting to be treated “not as a woman but as a human being” or “as a person.” I hear words like chairperson and spokesperson, and even absurdities such as the “freshperson class” and “personhole covers.” There is something seriously distorted about this view of humanity. I don’t want anybody treating me as a “person” rather than as a woman. Our sexual differences are the terms of our life, and to obscure them in any way is to weaken the very fabric of life itself. When they are lost, we are lost. Some women fondly imagine a new beginning of liberty, but it is in reality a new bondage, more bitter than anything they seek to be liberated from.
I want to know not “people” but men and women. I am interested in men as men, in women as women, and when you marry you marry a man because he is a man, and being a man, he becomes your husband. This is the glory of marriage —two separate and distinct kinds of beings are unified.
But when you have accepted him as a sinner, as a man, and as a husband, you must still remember that he is a person. As a person, he has a name. Nothing more infallibly reveals your attitude to another person than the name you call him by.
There are those who never call each other anything. I have heard a husband shout out a question or a comment to his wife from another room without using any form of address at all. I have heard wives do the same, and I have heard both refer to their spouses only by the third person pronoun. It seems to me that those who do this have never recognized or have forgotten the person they married. He has become a fixture.
Then there are those who call each other “mommy” and “daddy.” This is fine when speaking of the other to the children. But for a man to call his wife “mommy” is a dead giveaway. The magic has gone out of that marriage. Is he her lover still, or has he become her little boy? Is this a relationship that is still growing toward maturity, or is it regressing?
I would be the last to complain of endearing names. I like them. It does my heart good to hear a man call a woman “darling” or even “cream puff” if he wants to. It shows she’s special to him. Katherine Mansfield, whose tender and delightful love letters have all been published, unabridged, called her husband “Bogey” and he called her “Wig.” All I ask is that a couple call each other something. That they show by the way they address each other, in public or in bed, that they recognize a personality.
One of the most joyful discoveries of life is that in recognizing, affirming, and comforting another person we find ourselves recognized, affirmed, and comforted. It is a dead-end street to set out to know yourself or to “find” yourself or to define “who am I?”
“It is plain that no man can arrive at the true knowledge of himself without first having contemplated the divine character,” wrote John Calvin in the Introduction to his great Institutes. And it is in relation to other people that we ourselves become full persons. “No man is an island.” We are called to fellowship with God and we are called to fellowship with each other. Marriage is the most intimate and continuous relationship into which two people may enter, and as such provides the most uninterrupted opportunity for fulfillment of the personality. This is not to say, of course, that only married people can know fulfillment. The measure of self-giving is the measure of fulfillment. There are married people who have not learned the first lesson in self-giving. There are single people who have gone very far along the road. It has always seemed to me relatively easy to give myself for my husband first because I loved him with all my heart, and then because the rewards were usually more obvious and more immediate than they may be in other relationships. Loving a wife, as the Bible says (and surely it applies to loving a husband as well), is the same as loving your own body.
But if your husband is a person this means that you must accept the mystery of his personhood. We have already spoken of how men and women do not and cannot perfectly understand one another. And this is not simply because of sexual barriers. Persons of the same sex find also a closed door. Your husband is known fully only to God, and stands in a sense alone before Him. God said to Abraham, “Walk before Me and be thou perfect.” He did not suggest that Abraham could walk before Sarah and be perfect. Ultimately he is God’s man. He is free, and you must always reverence this freedom. There are questions you have no right to ask, matters into which you must not probe, and secrets you must be content never to know.
“Hasn’t a wife a right to know all?”
No. She cannot take or even ask for what is not given, and there are things a man cannot and ought not to give. The deeps call only to God.