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This was an interesting week in politics. President Obama shares in an interview that he feels personally supportive of the idea that all people, regardless of gender, should be able to marry. A few days later, Rick Santorum urges Mitt Romney to “step up and take advantage of” what he characterizes as “a very potent weapon.”

It strikes me that anyone who perceives marriage as a weapon does not understand the nature of marriage.

This would be like sending someone into the middle of a cold North Dakota winter urging them to take a warm blanket to use as a weapon.  It’s like sending your kid to school with a box of Band-Aids saying, “here, go figure out who you can hurt with these.”

Love–love as expressed in commitment, in devotion–cannot be weaponized. Love allows an end to weaponry. Love, and particularly the love of commitment and devotion, creates a condition in which we lay our weapons down because we no longer need them.

Marriage combines interesting elements of something I’ve blogged about previously. We can create safety by excluding other people–or, the exact opposite–by including them. Safety is created both by erecting boundaries and by relaxing them. Read Safety Through Separation, Safety Through Connection for more.

The exquisite thing I notice about marriage is that it perfectly combines these two qualities. Marriage is an exclusive arrangement between two people which allows them to have an inclusive, welcoming arrangement with the rest of the world. Marriage between two people says, “I have a legal arrangement with you that I don’t share with anyone else in the world; I have this arrangement with you, and you alone.”

What that allows, then, is for the couple to welcome an almost unlimited number of people into their lives. This is an exclusivity that supports inclusivity. To put another person first does not mean to put everyone else out. Rather, to put another person first, above all others, then allows the two, together, to welcome all others in. Marriage supports our power for generosity, inclusion and welcoming.

Sometimes couples use this power for the purpose of creating families of their own, either through birth or adoption, welcoming new people into the world.  Sometimes couples use it to embraces “external” families, whether that be a neighborhood, a community, a particular cause. They may welcome in the poor, the sick, the illiterate, the hungry, those who have lost fathers or mothers, those fleeing war. Sometimes they use it for acts of service, civil service, philanthropy, or spiritual practice. Many couples do all of those things.

I had a Dean in graduate school who, along with his wife and their very large wonderful house in Los Angeles, played “family of residence” to 20 or 30 of us who were displaced from a variety of geographical places across the US. Those of us who were stuck on campus through Thanksgiving break were invited to Thanksgiving at their house, a house of seemingly endless capacity for numbers when it came to feeding or hosting students. Their partnership (he’d preach and hold forth while she ran around the kitchen joyously and breathlessly, both) created a space into which they regularly welcomed dozens and dozens of people. There was a moment after a few years of knowing them where I felt as though my I and my girlfriend, both of us far from our real parents, had a real home and a real family with them. They felt like a “local” Mom and Dad who stood in for our real parents, far away.

In another place, a much smaller town, a partnership between two men who had been together for decades served as the locus for a gathering of other men, some of whom were gay and some of whom were simply men who loved men. Again, their home, their food, the energy of the decades they had spent together and the efforts of what they had built with each other served as a platform or a foundation onto which they could welcome many others. They supported many men of many ages, helping people move through life with a sense of family.

Healthy marriage is generous and inclusive of others, even while marriage is an exclusive arrangement between the two people who choose it. And as is the case in all relationships, boundaries within marriage are custom built. No two marriages are exactly the same. People in healthy marriages don’t judge others’ marriages; they know too much, and they know too well. They know that the marriage is up to the two people who build it, supported by those who love them. No one who seriously pays attention to their own marriage has any time or energy for judgments about someone else’s. Part of placing another person first means you have to pay attention.

Every marriage is its own set of agreements; most people today write their own vows, or at least adopt or fine-tune a standard set of vows to accurately reflect their own agreement. An interesting shift in the way people construe boundaries in marriage is that while marriage has been based for a relatively long time on the concept of monogamy, focus has shifted fairly recently to a different norm, sexual exclusivity. This focus is so prevalent in our culture that many people think monogamy and sexual exclusivity are the same thing, but they’re actually two completely different concepts. (Google search your way around if that’s news to you and you can research the differences in these two definitions.)

My perception from talking to hundreds of couples of all genders and combinations about marriage, and from the historical data that I’ve read, is that not much has changed. Marriage has, for at least the past thousand years, been based on monogamy (not on sexual exclusivity) and marriage today seems to be primarily based on monogamy (not on sexual exclusivity.) The data about that are fairly non-controversial, as I read them. I’m talking about data on what people actually do, not on what they claim they do; data that point towards what appears to be true, rather than what we wish were true. My thoughts about marriage here are meant to encompass every marriage of every kind, regardless of gender, orientation, spiritual beliefs, specific vows or practices–any mutually-binding relationship between two people based on lifelong commitment, devotion, and love. When healthy and high functioning, all of these marriages, regardless of the differences between them, include and nourish others.

One of the things we might notice about unhealthy marriages, or those marriages which are about to fail, is that the relationship becomes abnormally exclusive. Couples will often isolate or implode; sometimes a project will emerge to absorb the struggling couple (a new child, remodeling a house, a geographical move.) Concerned friends might find themselves increasingly walled off, unable to make contact, feeling disconnected or even shunned.

While extreme exclusivity is a normal and healthy part of a new relationship establishing itself (think of a honeymoon, for example) in mature relationships, the couple has energy for things beyond the couple itself at some point. Exclusivity starts to shift towards creating a sense of a larger “we,” whether through family or community or cause. Mature, healthy couples are generous, welcoming, inclusive. They serve, regardless of genders or combinations of genders, as pillars the rest of us can build on. They serve as the seeds for larger families of all different types, emerging from many different processes.

We might have many different opinions on these things, and on marriage itself. But one thing seems clear to me.

A person who looks at a warm, nourishing pot of soup and sees a weapon, has something wrong with them.

A person who walks into a village of hungry people with an armful of loaves of bread to see if he can hurt someone with them is a “few fries short of a Happy Meal.”

And anyone who looks at marriage and sees a weapon, has no idea whatsoever what marriage is, or what it can do in the lives of those who are devoted to it.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

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