Chapter 32: What Makes a Marriage Work
WHAT MAKES A MARRIAGE WORK
BEFORE I recommend the four things which I believe make a marriage work I have to acknowledge that there have been countless apparently very workable marriages in which these things mattered very little or not at all.
I think of Eugenia and Guayaquil. Eugenia, a Quichua Indian girl in her midteens, came to work as our housegirl in Shandia. To our surprise, she brought along a boy of about eleven whom she introduced as her husband. They moved in, not exactly bag and baggage, for I think it was just bag —an Indian carrying net, to be precise. Eugenia did the housework, Guayaquil went to school. He was hoping to make it through the sixth grade, which was as far as the mission school took boys in those days. When he came home from school he did whatever Eugenia told him to do —chopped wood or built a fire in the stove or hauled water, and sometimes chopped onions or stirred things or washed dishes, and it was a very convenient arrangement for all of us.
Eugenia’s older brother Gervacio was married to Guayaquil’s younger sister Carmela, a sweet little girl with huge dark eyes and a shy giggle. The mother of Guayaquil and Carmela had died when they were small and the father had decided that the easiest way to see that they were properly taken care of was to give them to their respective promised spouses. So they were given at an earlier age than would have been customary, but both marriages seemed completely successful. I asked one of the Indian women if these couples actually slept together. She whooped with laughter and said (her colloquialism loses a lot in translation), “No wife sleeps closer to her husband than Carmela!”
We watched how well polygamy worked in the Auca tribe. Our house adjoined that of Dabu, who had three wives. During the day we watched them together while their husband was out hunting. Their house, like ours, had no walls. Never once did we hear an argument, or see the slightest sign of friction between those women. Dabu was faithful to them so far as anyone knew (and everyone knew practically everything about everybody) and very generous in having taken them on, for all were widows with children of their own who would have had no one to hunt meat for them if Dabu had not been so bighearted.
We have known “mixed” marriages between people of very different culture or race which seemed to work happily.
Richard Hooker, the great English theologian, married the daughter of the landlady who kept the house where he stayed when he preached in London. She was, according to a friend, “a clownish silly woman who brought him neither beauty nor portion. The marriage was a misfortune and a mistake.” That was the friend’s judgment. Hooker himself was satisfied with Joan, calling her his “well-beloved wife,” and writing, “Woman was even in her first estate framed by nature not only after in time but inferior in excellency also unto men, howbeit in so due and sweet proportion as being presented before our eyes might be sooner perceived than defined. And even herein doth lie the reason why that kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock is seldom able to yield any reason of itself.”[11]
It is a touching statement coming from such a man. As to whether he had scriptural ground for believing that woman is “inferior in excellency” to man we shall look into later, but to him it must have seemed self-evident and hence in need of no higher authority. He must, however, have known “that kind of love which is the perfectest ground of wedlock,” and no one can argue with him on that.