Doubt, seen as our adversary, may be our friend
All I wanted to do was postpone the wedding.
But there were those invitations, he said.
Of course. The invitaions.
In 1985 I married a man about whom I had grave doubts largely because we had set in motion a process that seem to have acquired its own momentum.
Within two years, we divorced and I was left with a framed wedding invitation and the not very consoling satisfaction that I had been right from the start. It was cold comfort. Nearly 80 percent of men and women say they believe it was a mistake to marry their spouse, according to a recent suvvey. Some 48 percent of women and 42 percent of men say they were certain before they tied the knot that their nuptials would end in divorce.
So why did they even bother?
Carl Weisman, who conducted the study, says most of the respondents who admitted their qualms simply assumed that marriage was the next logical step in a relationship. Well, they figure, we’ve got to do something with this ardor and amity, why not marriage? Secondly, and lamentably, marriage is often employed as a salve for loneliness – the great sacramental cauterization of a wound that won’t heal. Anyone with the sense God gave a goat has got to know marriage is about as effective an antidote for loneliness as ginseng, but it doesn’t seem to stop anybody.
Benjamin Frankly famously advised, “When in doubt, don’t,” which seems sage advice in a country where nearly half the marriages end in divorce. But distinguishing between pre-ceremony jitters and justifiable anxiety over what could be a passing fancy is a delicate business. My brother and I walked rings around our Massachusetts neighborhood the morning of his wedding, as he despaired over the wisdom of his decision and I lamely assured him that he was doing the right thing. When it all came undone in a tangle of animosity and disillusionment 15 years later, I rebuked myself for my perfunctory encouragement years before.
“What do you do when you are not sure?” John Patrick Shanley’s play “Doubt” begins. Most of us, like the naïf Sister James in the play, would prefer to sidestep the question all together. Ambivalence is gut-churning and destabilizing and many of us would rather make a decision than squirm in an eddy of doubt. And yet Shanley reminds us that doubt is not the villain it seems. It is the unsteady electricity on which we feed. He suggests, a bit like the British novelist Graham Greene that it is when we are not sure that we are most alive.
Uncertainty breeds a vigorous engagement with the world, an intensity absent in a life of easy answers and pat solutions. Like any profound experience, including faith, love rides on squally seas. Faith without doubt, the devout tell us, is dead. Is the same true of love?
From love, not only with spouses, but with friends and family, we seek a certitude that too often eludes us. That may be because we’re never too sure of ourselves.
In the years since my disastrous first encounter with marriage, after having found a deeper, more sincere affection, I have learned to value doubt. It is an instinct, like all of them, there for our preservation — and sometimes our amusement. It destabilizes us. It addles us. It frightens us. But it opens us up, too, in ways that teaches us more about ourselves than we are sometimes ready to learn. ”Trust me” seems so easy to say but hard to embrace. And yet in matters most important to us, it is the only choice we’ve got.