Covenant of marriage can take many similar forms

I wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed your recent article "In absence of commitment, bonds wither" which I read in the March 13 edition of the Hawaii Tribune Herald.

My husband and I have been married almost two years. We were together for about 6½ years before we got married, and we lived together for about four of those years. We both had serious relationships before but were never married. I can honestly say that the commitment of marriage has changed our relationship much more than I thought it would. I loved my husband before we were married, but once we were married, that love deepened. Our sense of partnership and "we" deepened. His problems or my problems are much more now "our problems" and we work through them together, supporting each other. I have accepted his "faults" and no longer see them as reasons for breaking up but as the challenges in life that we must all work through together or accept, almost as if they are more "our faults" than his. I know I am not without my faults as well, and I feel he has taken this same approach.

As someone who is not religious, who comes from divorced parents and doesn't think there is anything wrong with people cohabitating, the depth of my feelings because of my marriage have surprised me a bit. I think that it is as you say, that marriage is just how we symbolize this commitment in the U.S., in our culture.

I do have a couple of questions for you if you have the time: Do you know what the data show on the success of people who are in long-term relationships and are not married? Do their relationships fail more or less often than those who are married? -- J.L., Hilo, Hawaii

Your letter made me smile. You say that a marriage commitment changed your relationship much more than you thought it would. This, coming from a self-confessed "not religious" person, in some ways makes my point more profoundly than someone obliged to a religion-based system of values.

And here is, frankly, my only real point: Marriage is a powerful, unique, life-changing symbol, even if not grounded in a religious worldview.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert turned her readership upside down in the book "Eat, Love, Pray." The story begins with a failed marriage. And, while not everybody has the resources to go on a Far East pilgrimage, her pilgrimage became a metaphor for those healing from failed marriages and/or failed commitments. Even if you can't spend weeks after a divorce actually traveling abroad, she offered the world a picture of pilgrimage that may also be accomplished within oneself.

But it was her follow-up work that I thought was even more telling. In "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage," she tells the story of how political happenstance forced her to re-examine the idea -- the powerful symbol -- of marriage. Gilbert would agree with you, J.L.: The power of the marriage symbol is, frankly, immutable. And it has changed her, most noticeably in this quote: "I'm getting rid of the philosophy, the sense that we should get and get and get without sacrificing anything."

I have not recently examined the data on the success/failure of married people compared with emotionally committed cohabitants. But what I do notice is how often the latter, having rejected the marriage symbol in principle, often create for themselves a variety of commitment ceremonies, including wearing rings. I think this is "a tell" about the power of the marriage symbol.

My prejudice is this: A thriving, growing, lifetime partnership requires more than the whimsical decision to live together. Exclusivity is the easy part. Officially married or not, the sheer rigor of a lifelong commitment requires a covenant, which I agree can come in many forms.

I guess I'm saying that all roads lead to Rome. Having rejected the socially accepted covenant of marriage, it astonishes me how many life partners reach to immediately replace that cultural practice with the same symbols, the same intent and the same hope.

During my hospice career as chaplain and bereavement counselor, I lost count of the number of unmarried, life-partner couples who exchanged marriage vows with one of them lying in a hospice bed. It reminded me of St. Augustine waiting to be baptized until the end of his life. It was as if their parting gift was the honored moniker of "husband wife."

Only marriage is marriage. Only radical commitment is commitment. Only a wife is a wife. Only a husband is a husband.

Thrive, J.L. Love your man. Be loved. This is a great gift to yourself and to the world.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns also appear on Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.