The ZimZum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage

Some say the expectations are the problem. If people just lived together in peace and harmony without all the legal obligations and wedding rings and assumptions that come from having a public ceremony in front of your friends and family with cake and an eighties cover band, then there would be a lot less heartache if things don’t work out. But sharing your life with someone—whatever that looks like—always involves challenges, and if you part ways, that kind of pain is always heartbreaking.

But whether there’s a ceremony or a ring or a legal document or not, whether it’s biology or cultural conditioning or simply pressure from the relatives, there is an enduring human longing to share our life with someone.

For us, it started in a pickup truck.

It was an early eighties Mazda pickup with a cab on the back and black stripes down the side.

R: I bought it from my neighbor, Dr. Dull.

K: It had a cassette player bolted under the dashboard with the smallest speakers you’ve ever seen.

R: That’s what you remember about that truck—its tiny speakers?

K: What I remember most are the butterflies I had in my stomach the first time I got into that truck. I was living in Arizona at the time and Rob was living in Los Angeles, and when I was accepted into a master’s program at USC, I called him and asked if he would help me find a place to live.

R: Which sounded a little suspicious to me because it was January and her program didn’t start until June.

K: I could say I was just planning ahead—but the truth is, I wanted to know whether this was something more than a friendship.

R: So as I pulled up to “Arrivals” at the airport, I had the strong sense that there was something else going on here. I thought it was better just to get it out in the open, and so when she got in the truck I asked her, “What percentage of your visit is actually to look for a place to live?” She smiled and said, “Well, it makes a great excuse.” I will never forget the BOOM!!! that went off in my heart when she said that.

K: Maybe we should back up for a moment. I grew up in Arizona, Rob grew up in Michigan, and we met on a tennis court our freshman year (#litres_trial_promo) at Wheaton College.

R: To be honest, I knew who she was before we met on that tennis court. During freshmen orientation they gave us a book called Who’s New, which was filled with pictures of incoming freshmen. My friends and I spent hours poring over that book. One of those first days of college, sitting in my room in Traber dorm, I came across Kristen’s picture. Wow, I thought. I should meet her, so that we could, um, study together.

K: I don’t remember Rob studying much, but I do remember once during that freshman year having a conversation with him about cactus. He was fascinated with cactus and couldn’t imagine that I came from a place where we had a large cactus in our yard.

R: Fascinated with cactus? (Cacti?) Really? That may be the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard for chatting up a girl. I suddenly developed an interest in cactus? Did I know how pathetic that must have sounded at the time?

K: Apparently it worked because that summer I sent him a letter (remember those?) with a photo of me standing next to a very large cactus.

R: I remember that photo. And I remember those letters. Our friendship was like that for four years—inside jokes, letters back and forth, having a meal together every now and then, going out as a group with my friends and her friends.

K: I’d go watch Rob’s band (#litres_trial_promo) perform. He had written one song in particular that moved me. The fact that he’d written those lyrics made me wonder what else was in there.

All of which brings us to graduation.

K: I was headed home to work in Arizona.

R: And I was moving to California, which meant driving through Arizona. In one of the first conversations Kristen and I ever had, we talked about waterskiing, and she said that her family had a MasterCraft, which to me was about the greatest boat a person could own (#litres_trial_promo), so I said, “Well, I ought to stop by sometime and we could go waterskiing.”

K: Which I thought would never actually happen. But then at graduation he reminded me of that conversation four years earlier, and he said, “Can I stop by at the end of the summer so we can go waterskiing?” A few months later he showed up at my parents’ house and stayed for several days. When he left, I hoped I would see him again. But I had no idea how that would work.

R: And so I continued on to L.A.

K: And I continued on with my life.

R: And I moved in with my eighty-two-year-old grandmother to take care of her while I went to seminary.

K: And then I got the early acceptance letter from USC, and I called him to tell him I’d be moving to L.A.—and the next thing I knew I was getting in that truck and saying, “It makes a great excuse.”

R: Which was a great line, by the way. Classic.

K: Thank you. But I think there’s an important point to make to here. I knew what I was getting into, and I’m not just talking about the truck. (#litres_trial_promo) I already knew his friends, his family; I’d seen him in all kinds of different situations—there weren’t any surprises. I was ready to see whether this was headed somewhere.

R: Which it was. Specifically, to my grandma’s apartment. (#litres_trial_promo) How killer is that? Me and this hot woman from the desert and my grandma, chillin’ on the green polyester couch with the paisley stitching.

You can be friends with someone, sometimes even for years, with a tremendous amount of respect and friendship and history between you, but when that spark ignites, everything changes.

Several months later we were living in the same city, shortly after that we were engaged, nine months later we were married, and twenty years later we’re still exploring the endless depths of whatever it is that began when Kristen got in that truck and we drove off together.

You find each other, your centers of gravity expand as your lives become more and more entwined. You create space for this other person to thrive

while they’re doing the same for you.

This creates a flow of energy in the space between you.

This energy field is at the heart of marriage. It flows in the space between you, space that exists nowhere else in the universe.

You can become more familiar with how this energy field works.

You can develop language between you to identify what’s happening in the space between you.

You can sharpen your abilities to assess it.

You can act in certain ways to increase the flow.

You can identify what’s blocking the flow, and then you can overcome those barriers.

Years into your marriage, you can continue to intensify this energetic flow between you.

It is risky to give yourself to another. There are no guarantees, and there are lots of ways for it to fall apart and break your heart. But the upside is infinite. (#litres_trial_promo)

There is a mysterious, indescribable, complex exchange that can happen in the space between you, filling you with joy, confirming your intuition that marriage is not only good for you, but good for the world. Marriage has the uniquely powerful capacity to transform you both into more loving and generous and courageous and compassionate people. Marriage—gay and straight—is a gift to the world because the world needs more—not less—love, fidelity, commitment, devotion, and sacrifice.

We’re for marriage, and we want to give you a new way of understanding marriage.

We call this way the zimzum of love.

Which of course raises the question:

What’s a zimzum?

K: Rob loves words. I realize that may sound strange, but he loves finding new words and odd phrases and then using them around the house, repeating them and thinking they’re hilarious. And the more random the better (#litres_trial_promo), like catty wompus or rusty Kleenex.

R: Or Engelbert Humperdinck—

K: —as I was saying …