In celebration of Valentine’s Day, our Story of a Man blog is Michael Gurian’s poem, “What I’ve Learned About Marriage.”  It is a mind expanding poem in a number of ways, and benefits from multiple readings.  We hope you enjoy it.

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What I’ve Learned About Marriage

1.

Never does “I love you” lack in meaning, which is also its danger.  Sometimes it becomes a lens that magnifies a wound, sometimes it becomes the wound itself.  Enough times, we hope, it will regard our own and our lover’s wounds with kindness and wonder.

2.

When you rely on words to convey your love, you become thirsty for words, and the paragraph seems never to close, and soon this worries you cruelly.  But when you rely only on actions to convey your love, the paragraph can seem as if it never opened enough to let certainty in.

3.

Just as when you apologize too little, you haunt your lover, but when you apologize too much, you haunt yourself.  In both, there is an eerie sense of injustice, a paralysis in both of you like ghosts inside you that fear love’s joy.

4.

What should we do when one of us is more in love than the other?  Let it feel like the flower stinging the bee.  Let the quieter lover now learn how to feel love in a receiving that is less like taking and more like giving–the stung flower open to a new tenderness.

5.

In every marriage, there comes a time when incessant action ends.  Children are grown.  The constant confession of the “I” bows down.  You hear hidden sounds as if Love itself talks freely. Now, when youthful ardors return, they make you wise.

6.

If in love you expect perfection, you made for yourself a cage in which a singing bird looks far away from you.  If in love you expect too little, you’ve made a cage in which the singing bird stares too vaguely into you.

7.

There are always hidden under-layers between lovers:  our eyes, organs, skin, hands, lips are meant to explore this soil.  After making children, the divine purpose of sex cries out for both body and soul to make each element of the trinity “I love you” equally generous.

8.

When love ends, which of you broke the thread?  The lover who pulled too hard, or the lover who held on too long?  All betrayals begin with trust, all discipline with madness.  The torn thread, if repaired, will be strengthened by new knots.

9.

Despair says, “I cannot live with the roughness of love.”  Escape says, “I will not try to love anymore.”   Anger says, “I have been waiting all along for this failure.”  Hope says, “I will wake up one day understanding all this.”

10.

Love is a thin thread pressed through a thin opening.  It is natural to move through the needle-head carrying iron burdens.  Duty says, “Love is its own reason to repair the thread.”  Happiness says, “We are just now finding out who we are.”

11.

To say “I love you” is so dangerous we thrill to try it often despite that most of the promises we’ve heard about love are idolatry and every marriage is newly made as if from invisible skein only visible in a radiance we cannot grasp.

12.

What I’ve learned about love I’ve held onto strongly since my birth.  Now, finally, after 35 years of marriage, I’ve let the string go.  If I have gained any completeness in love, it is by losing myself to the dangers of eternal frankness.

Copyright © Michael Gurian 2022

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