Spotlight Couple
A wedding is for a day... A marriage is for a lifetime
I appreciate Ed's sense of humor and his sense of fun. I also am thankful for Ed's sense of family; my father was the kind of man who put his family first, and Ed is very much the same.
What was my favorite vacation?
Last summer, we went to Ireland. It has been Ed's dream to travel to Ireland, and we spent weeks planning the itinerary. We would go out to dinner each week on a date and we would bring the travelogues with us. Being with Ed when he realized his dream, and watching him enjoy all the experiences, made me feel very special. Also, we brought along our son, and Ed's father, sister and stepmother came with us; we spent Father's Day in Dublin with three generations of Morrisseys.
Commitment impacts our marriage
When we were first married, we had all the issues of blended families. We thought we would all just immediately be a nuclear family and everything would be wonderful without effort. Instead, the transition was tough, and eventually we sought counseling. I was also struggling with serious health issues, which brought us closer but increased the stress level. What saw us through the rough patches was our commitment to each other and to God. It's easy to be married in better, richer and in health, but for all the other times, it's the commitment that keeps you working on it.
Who are your role models for marriage?
My parents and my grandparents. They had issues, of course, but their marriages lasted. My parents were married 36 years and my grandparents for 65 years. My grandmother would tell funny and loving stories about my grandfather during their first years together, down to the smallest detail.
I also remember the parents of one of my school friends, whose love for each other and sense of fun were always apparent whenever I was around them. Her father would spontaneously twirl her mother around in a tango in the kitchen, or hug and kiss each other, and always looked happy together.
Humor relieves stress by reminding us how pretty most issues are, and how important we are to one another. Marcia doesn't let a day go by without giving me a hug, kiss, and one of her great smiles.
What sacrifices have you made?
I honestly can't say that I've sacrificed anything being married. There may be times when Marcia and I disagree on something that I'll wish I could just make decisions by myself and for myself, but to be truthful, we make better decisions together than I ever did on my own. While I think it's healthy to live a few years on your own before getting married, I can't think of any phase in my life that hasn't been improved by being married. I eat better, sleep better, and even work better.
What's most important in a marriage?
Commitment. Love is easy when times are good, but romance won't get you past an argument over how to discipline your children, or how to handle your money, because those issues aren't terribly romantic to begin with. There are times in every marriage when you have one hand on your keys and your eye on the doorknob. Physical attraction and sappy love songs do not get you past those points. Being committed to your spouse, your family, and God see you through and carry you until your feet are under you again.
My favorite marriage vacation....
...was a week spent in Lake Superior, on Madeline Island, when we were really struggling with blended-family issues. It felt like we'd called a time out, stepped out of our hardening positions, and taken some time out to just be us. We did just enough to keep us busy and allowed ourselves plenty of down time to spend quiet time together. Once the week was over, we found that many walls had been dismantled and that we prepared to work on solutions rather than talking at each other.
Learn from your past (and society's) to create
an even better future
Ed's note: Marriage grew of the ME movement. Me is a weekend experience, run by lay people, not counselors, who share from their real life experiences. Then participants individually write about their reactions to a given topic. Next, they get together with their mate and swap notebooks. Finally, they share verbally with each other. It's a process that has worked magic for over thirty years. For more information about the weekend experience, call 651-454-3238.
We don't include crisis and statistics to scare you, but we want to give you an accurate picture of the state of marriage in today's world. The National Marriage Project at Rutgers University report in 2001 describes a social institution under siege. Not only did the marriage rate drop more than a third from 1960 to 2000, but also the percentage of divorced adults quadrupled in the same period and is now at an all-time high, according to the Census Department. Sixty-two percent of young adults between 20 and 29 believe that living together is good practice for marriage; cohabitation has increased in this period from 439,000 people to well over 4 million, despite evidence that couples who cohabitate are more likely to divorce. Fifty-two percent say that they see so few successful marriages that it causes them to question marriage as "a way of life." Marriages are less happy today than in past decades, and the damage that divorce does to children has created a vicious cycle of pessimistic expectations.
Is divorce really that prevalent in today's society?
If I asked for a show of hands in any room of people whose family or friends have experienced divorce, as a spouse or child, I would guess that almost everyone would have a hand raised. How different that would have been fifty years ago! Chances are that your grandparents rarely heard of divorce and that for your great-grandparents, divorce was so scandalous that it was barely mentioned.
In my own family, divorce has caused painful disillusion with marriage. My childhood could have been a script for a typical American family: two parents, a son and daughter (in that order), a dog, a three-bedroom mortgage in a suburban setting. It seemed so normal, and at one time, it was.
When I became a teenager, I began to notice that Mom and Dad did not interact with each other as they used to do. There seemed to be more tension, less conversation, and in general just a lot more silence. Looking back, I wonder it that was when it truly began or if I just became more aware of it while I was trying to establish my own identity in life. I took more opportunity to absent myself from the house, getting involved in school activities that ensured I would spend significant time away. My younger sister used to beg me to stay home so she wouldn't be alone with Mom and Dad when they were fighting. She stayed in her room and tried to pretend nothing was wrong, except that she stayed angry at me for not being there. The family was getting pushed apart-the entire family.
And please understand, I am not talking about an abusive situation at all. I am talking about two people who stopped growing together and began to want different things out of life. My mother, who had worked part-time off and on when we were younger, was bored now that we were older and wanted a career. Dad, who is ten years older than Mom, felt that she should subordinate that to taking care of the family. From my perspective, they allowed these issues to fester and grow in silence until they gathered other issues into them and it overwhelmed their relationship. My parents split up when I was sixteen and my sister was fifteen.
The end result of this is that I grew up fearing the end of relationships, and so avoided them. Because a number of our relatives went through divorces in this period, many of the younger generation in my family seem to view marriage not as a covenant or a commitment, but as a transitory state. That's what we were taught in my family. And as the previous statistics show, that's what many, many more families have experienced as well.
What has caused this seismic shift in our culture?
For many Americans, the pursuit of individual fulfillment and individual happiness has become an obsession, almost a religion in itself. Values, once deeply held, that stressed family and community now seem hopelessly outdated. "Until death do us part" has been replaced by "as long as I'm happy." Couples seem to be marrying for better, richer and in health...and conveniently forgetting the other half of the vows. In fact, a friend of ours speaks of a magazine article about a London jeweler who makes wedding bands that don't go all the way around the finger. The message is that there is always a way out-if you're not happy.
Marcia has a great suggestion: try taking a walk through a local cemetery. Read the inscriptions on the markers of headstones. You won't find any that say: "Drove a really cool car." "She visited the French Riviera." "His suits were all tailor-made." "Got broadband Internet connections before everyone else on his block." You're going to see what people will really remember you for: "Beloved husband." "Devoted wife." ""Loving father and mother."
When I married Marcia, I knew it was for a lifetime -"until death do us part." But Marcia has been hurt by divorce as well; her first husband left her with a young son, and my greatest concern is that he sees that marriage can work. He's certainly seen how it doesn't, and felt its affects. After my experience growing up, it is doubly important to me to be the example in his life, that parents honor their commitments and that all men don't leave. I don't want him growing up afraid of relationships and commitment, nor do I want him to believe that all relationships are temporary, especially marriages. I want him to learn that true happiness does not come from material possessions or physical pleasure as an end to itself, but in building a family and serving God.