Oh, The Period of Adjustment

They say that when you get married, you go through a 'period of adjustment' when you start to live with another person. I am sure that is true -- but I think that engagement also is a period of adjustment. Things obviously become more serious, and my fiance and I are making an effort to get involved in one another's interests in a new way. For example, my fiance LOVES football, and I could care less. I live in a college town where football literally dictates the schedule of the entire town, well no - the entire state and the lives of everyone from that state. Don't plan your wedding for football season in my state, or no one will come.

Anyway, I have been making a HUGE effort to actually get into football - and it is so hard! In fact, right now, I am sitting with my fiance watching football - but I am writing this blog post. What do you do to get into what your spouse (or in my case future spouse) loves? I am making an effort -- and I am gonna have to be around it for a lifetime, so I guess I should try, right? And he does too. Marriage and prepping for it is a work, but a wonderful one.

I found some consolation in reading a little article about marriage by Louise Cowan. It's called 'Marriage As a Creative Work.' She speaks about as a professor of literature, but the essence of the article really drives home the point about the purpose of marriage. Here's a snippet of what Cowan says:

I am maintaining that this mysterious phenomenon of becoming “one flesh” occurs only in marriage, not in any relation outside marriage. It is not a property of sexual love, then, but of marriage. Marriage is an actual, very real vocation: its task, primarily, is not just the happiness of two people, or the establishment of a family, or even the salvation of two souls; but the construction of an entity, which constitutes a sacred area within society, a territory within which the divine may pitch its tent. (Recall Abraham and Sarah; the Holy Family.)

I find that with all the hum drum of daily life in preparing for marriage, it's so helpful to put into perspective the sacramental aspect of married life, and to remember the purpose of what we are all trying to achieve: salvation.