Marriage, in the context of Relationship Ecology?

Some of my friends have been challenging me on the concept of marriage. What is the purpose of marriage, when we see it as a practice that perpetuates a holding of resources, ownership of partner and children, and a closing off from community?

These are patterns that I have observed as well, yet I feel that these patterns are reflections of a broader cultural way rather than a reflection of the concept of marriage itself.

I have not experienced marriage, but what I do experience is the power and influence of marriage in my life. Our family systems are often built on the systems of marriage, and it is a kind of commitment that remains deeply significant to many of us today.

“Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting–that’s the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that’s what you have become when you have married. You’re no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one,” Joseph Campbell.

In this quote by Joseph Campbell, I am struck by my resonance to the word sacrifice that he uses. I recently spoke to a friend who felt that the sacrifice associated in marriage feels oppressive. He felt that this kind of sacrificing to another person cuts out our autonomy and creates a dynamic in which we are suppressing our free will in fear that the other person might leave us. Within this dynamic, our safety is hinged on the person we are in partnership with.  

I agreed with him, that a dynamic of feeling safety and perhaps even completion through a structure where we are expected to practice emotional intimacy with just one person prevents a cultivation of relationship ecology. However, I disagreed in the concept that marriage equated this kind of dynamic. Instead, I felt that our culture of needing ownership as a signifier of safety was what perpetuated these kinds of closed partnerships, not the idea of marriage.

For me, marriage embodies what Joseph Campbell speaks to. It is a sacrifice that cultivates a different kind of energetic resonance. One that is meant to serve the collective, the community, the village. Very often, sacrifice is practiced as neglecting our own needs to serve somebody else. Yet when we look back at the etymology of the word sacrifice, we can see that Latin for sacrificus finds its roots in the phrase “a making sacred.”  

I was talking with my teacher Meng about sacrifice recently. I was musing on how often I kept reading in my divination books on the 易经Yi Jing (I Ching, Book of Changes) about animal sacrifice. I was confused, why do they keep ending with animal sacrifice?! I don’t understand?! How do I translate this into my life??

Meng helped me see that animal sacrifice must be seen through the lens of how the ancients perceived life and death. “They saw life and death as a continuum,” Meng said, death marks a transformation, a journey into another realm, with no morality placed on either phase, but an understanding that to call in change means a sacrifice of significance must be made.

For the ancients, animals represented the most important members to one’s livelihood. To be sacrificed was a deep honor, it was a signifier of one’s importance in our lives, and how it would be only through its existence and sacrifice that the next stage in life could be ratified.  

In a modernized world, the sacrifice of animals doesn’t have the same significance as it had been as a cultural wayfinding tool of the ancients. But the essence of sacrifice as letting go of what has been life giving to create the space for the sacred, is what I believe the form of marriage speaks to.

In some Chinese wisdom traditions, the idea of phases is concurrent with the concept of living itself. Everything is phasal, there is no resting place that isn’t on the way to the next current of change. Marriage represents a stage of life, a moment in time where we take on a type of sacrifice. Where we let go of searching for ourselves and turn towards a modality of creating a sacred container.

This sacred container is one in which there are agreements around committing to a level of intimacy and connection with a limited group of people. It is in this limitation that what is sacred can exist. When a home is open to every single person, it loses its sacred container. It offers another kind of function, one that has its benefits and disadvantages as well.

When we have the energy of learning, of absorption, of deep curiosity to the world, it is important for us to remain open to experientially witness and receive the many expressions of life. When we have the energy of cultivating new life, of mastering our skills, of doing deep re-patterning work, it is important for us to close off streams of attention so we may hone and focus on what we have capacity for.

Neither way is better or worse, yet both are important to create the tensions in the world that allow for us to move towards change. Marriage is a form that we can use to commit to a sacred container. It can keep us together for the sake of evolving us into a being shaped by its commitment to sacrifice.

If every decision we make shapes us, we get to in this lifetime choose the direction in which we hope to be shaped. For some, marriage is an intimate way to be shaped. It is a commitment which we can take on in this lifetime that’ll lead us towards a kind of shared life that creates limits which through we can also find expansion.

As a relationship ecologist, I see all forms of intimate expression as part of our ecology. Sometimes we need to learn what doesn’t work for us to learn what does. I have witnessed many different forms of marriage in my communities of practice, and I see that there are some forms of marriage that act as place of gathering. They create a secure foundation in which the village can circle around in ceremony with, in celebration with, in grief with. These are the marriages that I feel most drawn to, but they are not necessarily the only one’s of value.

So, sacrifice is in essence, what allows for a union of two into one. It can look like a sacrifice of ourselves for the needs of others, and it can look like a sacrifice of our attention from around us towards a sacred container. What is our phase in this moment, is only a phase in the long arc of time.