The ZimZum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage

But then you meet someone—or you’ve known someone for a while—and that person has their own life, with their own center of gravity, and your heart begins to shift toward them.

You find yourself thinking about them, drawn to them. When you’re not with them, you miss them, you ache for them, your phone rings and when you see that it’s them you feel a surge of electricity through your body.

You talk for hours. You start arranging your life so that you can spend as much time as possible with them as your lives become increasingly intertwined.

As you become familiar with what moves and drives and inspires them, their well-being begins to matter to you more than your own. You find yourself making sacrifices for them,

while they’re doing the same for you.

It’s here that you become aware of a subterranean shift, a tectonic slide in your heart, one that alters the course of your life:

Your center of gravity expands.

You are in new territory.

Before, it was just you.

Now, it’s you—and this other person.

Before, there was one.

Now, there are two.

As you intentionally create space for this person in your life and they create space in their life for you, this movement creates space between you—space that has an energetic flow to it.

This flow in the space between you is like an energy field or an electrical current. It’s the draw, the pull, the magnetic attraction that leads you to give yourself to this person in a way you don’t give yourself to anyone else on the planet.

It’s a vibrant, pulsing, humming flow that stirs your heart and causes your soul to soar. You talk about falling in love because of the feeling of weightlessness it evokes; you speak of finding your other half because of those moments when your boundaries feel porous, like you don’t know where you end and they begin. You speak of being swept away, like you’re caught up in something bigger than the both of you, like you’re flying, the intoxicating attraction you feel toward another human being taking you both somewhere new and thrilling.

And then there’s us, standing in our kitchen arguing about something one of us said about the microwave.

K: It was me. I made a comment—

R: —that made no sense.

K: And then he wouldn’t drop it.

R: I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about.

K: And so he got butt-headed about it.

R: Just explain what you meant.

K: Just drop it. Let it go. Relax.

R: So you’re saying you didn’t mean it?

K: I’m saying it’s not worth discussing.

R: Then why did you say it?

We’re going round and round having the dumbest discussion in which neither of us is actually listening to the other and it’s getting more and more ridiculous because we’re making less and less sense—and then our older son, who’s been sitting there the entire time witnessing this train wreck of a conversation, finally says,

K: With his head in his hands,

Will you two stop it? You’re driving me crazy!

(We’re laughing as we write this.)

There are moments in marriage when you realize that you’re brushing up against our deepest experiences of what it means to be human, when you become aware that some of the most profound truths of the universe are lying next to you in bed, moments that illuminate our most innate and mysterious longings for grace and connection and vitality.

And then there are other moments, when lofty talk about two becoming one and I found my other half seems delusional, when you wonder, Who is this crazy person and why in the world did I ever want to be married to them?

Marriage.

You find someone—or they find you (that’s part of the mystery, isn’t it?)—and out of seven billion people on the planet, you decide to say yes to just one of them, till death do you part.

There is something about marriage—something about the potential, the promise, and the possibilities of creating a life together—something so powerful and compelling and alluring that despite all the pain marriage has caused over the years, people are still looking for that one person—and still getting married.

Still standing on beaches staring into each other’s eyes for engagement photos, still registering for matching bath towels, still trying to figure out whether or not the groomsmen should wear the cummerbunds, because, after all, they’re included in the rental.

K:The dating site (#litres_trial_promo)match.com (http://www.match.com)gets around seventeen million unique visitors a month. (#litres_trial_promo) Seventeen million people a month holding out hope that that person is out there.

There’s all sorts of speculation about exactly how many marriages don’t last—the general consensus being quite a few—but statistics are beside the point because we’ve all seen marriages unravel around us—neighbors, co-workers, parents of our kids’ friends—people taking off wedding rings, selling houses, working out joint custody arrangements.

Divorce is like a death, only the other person is still alive.

Some say that the enduring draw of marriage is rooted in cultural conditioning. And they have a point. Our daughter was watching a movie recently about a princess who was waiting for her prince to rescue her so that they could live happily ever.

And she’s four (our daughter, not the princess).

Others say that our ongoing propensity to keep getting hitched is simply biology in its more advanced and organized forms, that we’re hardwired to find someone to make more someones with and so marriage is simply a social construct we’ve created to propagate our species.

R: Two words about that: throw pillows.

K: Throw pillows?

R: Dudes learning to properly arrange throw pillows on the couch because that’s how she likes it.

K: What do you mean by that?

R: There’s a direct connection between primal mating impulses rooted in biological survival instincts and the intentional organizing of decorative cushions.

K: In other words, our species has an astonishing ability to adapt.

And then there’s the Jagger Theory (as in, Mick), which states in a very straightforward manner that monogamy isn’t our natural inclination so why do we keep torturing ourselves with this outdated and antiquated custom that shackles two people to the constricting notion that they must remain exclusively and faithfully committed to each other with no other experiences of a similar sort until one of them is left standing over the grave of the other?

That question leads to another question, one many people have about marriage: Has any institution/idea/arrangement caused so many people so much agony? Is there a greater ache than giving your heart—not to mention your life—to someone, only to have it collapse and fall apart on you?