Up against it

Kierkegaard, marriage, and witnessing

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On a motionless afternoon, I sat on a friend’s stoop and waited to be let inside. A branch on a nearby tree became severed from its primary limb, hurtled through the air like a harpoon and pierced the flower bed beneath it. A neighbor witnessed the felling. We said nothing.

Across the borough, an acquaintance celebrates a baby shower. One state away, a friend gets her doctorate. Friends lose jobs, others start them. There are engagements, preparations for weddings, moves to the neighborhood suddenly burgeoning with friends from almost every chapter of my life. Ripples of change, sometimes so distant for me, I forget to notice until there’s a social media post, an evite, a birthday for the twenty-seventh time, a close friend’s lament. Sometimes I forget to even say congratulations.

If I’d chosen differently, if I waited outside a second longer, would any of these outcomes have changed? Surely, they’ll go on happening whether they catch my attention. If a tree falls in Brooklyn, and no one sees it, did it actually fall?

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This month, I’m taking a class on the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the political through the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. My boyfriend suggested we take a class together, and I’ve been fascinated by Kierkegaard since undergrad when I first read his work on the sacrifice of Abraham. Admittedly, I’m not as invested in the political as applied to Kierkegaard’s writing as I am to just get more guided time reading his works. Either way, I’ll be spending a month wading through his difficult but very rewarding writing.

In this encounter with Kierkegaard, I’ve been preoccupied with his equation of the ethical with marriage.¹ Kierkegaard famously agonized about marriage. Having broken off his own engagement, partly because he worried he wouldn’t be able to dedicate himself as fully to writing, he became obsessed with parsing out, often through allegory, the teleology of binding oneself to something (or someone) beyond the self. He didn’t seem to come to many conclusions other than he wasn’t fit for it. In some ways, he seemed convinced he had failed, in his faith and in his life, because he didn’t marry. Whether that choice was made to preserve himself spiritually or otherwise remains somewhat unanswered. But he left a body of work obsessed with the very real question he could not entirely answer: to marry or not to marry? And either way, why does it matter?

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Recently, my boyfriend and I debated whether or not monogamists and non-monogamists should attempt to reform the other to their mode of existence. I felt that it was an apples to oranges situation; neither should proselytize to the other. Let each camp practice the way they wish, believing they are right and leave the others alone. My boyfriend disagreed. The non-monogamists had a right to try to reform, as all parties who are contra the hegemonic structures do. I started to bristle.

We didn’t get very far in our debate. We were on our way to hang out with other couples. It was one of the first summer nights. We walked with doubt in the other’s position. We walked the walk of faith that we could love each other and still disagree.

Like Kierkegaard, we were debating modes of existence and how individuals might slide from one realm back into another. A few days later, on a different walk through the neighborhood, my visiting friend and I discussed the prospect of marriage. I wondered why men (vis-a-vis heterosexual relationships) were often more ambivalent about marriage than women, why their hesitations were so often the cause of existential crises within the relationship.

I have also wondered why men seem often more willing to declare their desire to have children than get married. If marriage is about a fear of commitment, why are they willing to make the ultimate commitment? Isn’t marriage, in comparison, more low key? To intend to have a child together is more binding (one way or another) than marriage. A union could fall apart, but the child would remain as a fact of that love, whether the relationship itself survives. Marriage could be as good as a pinky promise. A baby is forever.

My friend agreed that it was a pretty common disposition among men. In fact, my friend shared that he felt the same, marriage was kind of whatever. But having a child together would be the higher expression of love. I agreed, to an extent, but it didn’t answer why there’s such a divide between genders, or maybe more broadly, between those who really want to be married and those who, maybe in the most generous evaluation, couldn’t really care either way.

We had some guesses, but also arrived at no conclusions. It was a fitting conversation with one of my oldest friends, a friend who even in our theorizing, I’ve felt completely understood, a friend with whom it’s possible to pick up exactly where we left off despite months of not seeing each other.

I didn’t ask my friend if he thought marriage mattered at all. Is it really the best mode of existence, when we realize, as individuals, there’s only so much hegemony we can resist? Can the answer be that some of us just find it romantic for whatever reason? Even if it can’t be divorced from hegemony or patriarchy or other problematic systems of oppression, does it still make sense as a gesture? There are writers and thinkers better suited to confront those negations than me. Then again, the romantic begins to fall apart when applying a Kierkegaardian lens, making me wonder if there’s any argument for it all. Maybe all those who are apathetic have a hunch that marriage will mark the end of certain modes of being. Maybe there are more aesthetes than there are ethicists.

And with good reason. To Kierkegaard, passion, by definition, ends with marriage. When one moves from the aesthetic (a realm of passion) to the ethical (the realm of the rational), marriage transforms from the romantic ideal of the erotic towards the commitment to the eternal. Who would ever willingly admit they were ok with the end of passion?

The word commitment is key here. Obviously, not all marriages make it to the eternal. Some marriages don’t even make it to the long-term. To Kierkegaard, marriage is a test of faith, not a guarantee. That pinky promise is just about all one can rely on. A working towards the eternal, not an immediate entrance into it, with the belief that eventually we will conquer time itself and reach the splendor of transcendence. If someone was scared of commitment, maybe this would be a comfort. That marriage isn’t a guarantee, despite all the insistence otherwise.

We can count ourselves lucky. We don’t have to share our marriage beds with Kierkegaard (unless you and your lover take a class on him and take your assigned reading with you into the sheets, so right now, my boyfriend and I do have an extra bedmate). But don’t worry otherwise. It doesn’t really matter if Kierkegaard would dismiss the notion of marriage as romantic. I listen to my friends when I ask them whether or not they want to get married eventually. The answers are usually without self-consciousness. Some things just make sense.

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I’ve been thinking about the act of witnessing, less in the political sense than in the personal. To be a witness is to be both participant and bystander. To be able to speak and confirm the event’s legitimacy, but also to stay silent and a supporting actor. While it is often critical to speak, there is transcendence in silence.

I have three weddings to attend this year. Witnessing is essential for a wedding to happen. In a smaller ceremony, only one witness is required to legitimize a union. But in the modern sense, we’ve shifted away from the simple legality of marriage into an orientation to community. A wedding of a dear friend a few years ago included a moment when the officiant turned to the guests and asked them to vow to support the couple as a community. I began to cry then, and didn’t stop.

My own witnessing of marriage makes me believe that Kierkegaard was both right and wrong. I’m in a part of my life where more and more friends are beginning to consider, if not follow through on marriage. They’re close to taking the leap. I don’t look at these marriages and think they are devoid of passion. Actually, quite the opposite. These marriages are reasons for celebration, that two individuals can come back together after any time apart and be happy to see each other. These marriages do, however, signal something greater than just passion, like Kierkegaard argues.

In researching for this essay, I found a piece on the parallels between the writing of George Eliot and Kierkegaard, in which Clare Carlisle² points out that Eliot, who never married but lived with and supported her already married lover, viewed marriage as more of an experience than a legal institution. Carlisle argues that both Eliot and Kierkegaard’s non-marriages were what begot their ability to produce their masterworks. Eliot’s leap towards the experience of marriage and Kierkegaard’s leap away informed their writing. The experience mattered.

I’ve been looking at my friends’ marriages in a similar way. These unions are not a collapse into hegemony, but a more intentional orientation toward experience. Kierkegaard also wrote, “A love affair is always an instructive theme regarding what it means to exist.” So whether that love affair results in marriage or an end or simply goes on being a love affair, there is something to be learned. For all Kierkegaard’s uncertainty, I was relieved to find absolute agreement between us.

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Last fall, my boyfriend and I did genetic testing to determine whether or not he’s a carrier for the gene that causes my chronic illness. He isn’t. The days following the results, we lived in a haze of honeymoon bliss. Our leap had paid off. While we waited for the results, I wavered, he didn’t. He wavered, I stood firm. We wondered whether we made the right choice. We weren’t unbelieving, we simply believed it would be work out. But the fact is that we leapt. I joked that after we went through this incredibly stressful process, when we arrived on the other side, it felt like we were spiritually married.

I don’t have the experience to know why a marriage changes a relationship. Regardless, I like the idea that it is a move toward the spiritual, to the eternal. To recognize the insufficiency of self as a container, to desire a journey that is shared rather than a solitary path. As Carlisle writes about Kierkegaard and Eliot, the choice to marry (or not) does not end in a singular outcome. There are more possibilities than either/or. I, for one, have always preferred to live in possibility.

A marriage is more than a wedding, that much I know. So when women desire marriage, it’s not about a big party or a beautiful dress or locking down a partner or fear of the unknown. Perhaps those who desire marriage understood what Kierkegaard wasn’t ready for. Some are more prepared for the eternal. A marriage is a good container when the individuals within are ready to discover each other in new ways, having already discovered themselves apart.

I don’t know why, or if, marriage matters to me. From where I currently stand, I’m much closer to Kierkegaard than I am to the knight of faith who fearlessly forges ahead. But the edge of the eternal is in view. My own walls have begun to fall. I’ll admit I’m comfortable considering the edge. I can even begin to understand it. Why wouldn’t I seek eternal solitude in the arms of someone with whom being with feels the closest I’ll get to God? For now, I’ll bear witness as my friends experience their own beginnings with the eternal. And maddeningly, they’ll just seem to know something I don’t know until I leap after them.

Heathers (1988), dir. Michael Lehmann

1. Most of this essay circles around ideas from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard also writes at length about marriage in Either/Or.

2. Clare Carlisle, “After the Leap: Marriage and Philosophy in George Eliot and Søren Kierkegaard,” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/after-the-leap-marriage-and-philosophy-in-george-eliot-and-soren-kierkegaard/