The Lamp

Photo by zero take on Unsplash

The lamp next to my writing spot in the L bend of the couch has a broken shade. I love that lamp. I found it at a Habitat for Humanity Re-Store the year I got married. The shade is covered with a delicate paper with dried flowers pressed into it, like the paper I used for my wedding invitations. Dried flowers was the theme of my wedding, even my bouquet was dried. Getting married in January in a muslin dress felt like an excuse to be unconventional, if I needed an excuse. It was perhaps the only aspect of the event that truly belonged to me. Now, eleven years later, the lamp shade is broken, and I don’t know if I can fix it. I took the lamp out of the corner by the piano and put it next to the couch where it would be more visible, because it’s beautiful and I wanted to spend more time with it. But it was also fragile, use has left it torn, and now it makes me sad. I wish for a world that is kinder to such beautiful things.

We went to another wedding on Saturday, my third for this year. I have always loved weddings—the exuberant joy, the excitement, the relief that all the hard work has paid off—but I think this is less true than it used to be. The reason? Wedding sermons. Wedding sermons are the worst. Nearly all of the wedding sermons I have heard in my life have ranged from cringy to downright infuriating. The theme for this last one was “dying,” oddly enough. When you get married, the barely-out-of-seminary pastor assured us all, the “single you” dies, and a couple is born. This dying continues throughout a marriage, because you must “die to self” continually to make a relationship work. This was all said without irony as we of the audience sat melting in 90+ degree heat in full sun, working our program fans like we were trying to collectively conjure a breeze. It was brutal, like the way I was biting my tongue, because standing up in the middle of a wedding ceremony and shouting “Bullshit!” isn’t considered polite.

Mercifully, the service was short, and there was iced coffee being served by actual baristas in the marginally cooler but shaded reception tent. There, we were seated with two couples: one couple much older than us and one somewhat younger. We swapped “how we met” stories, wedding reception small talk. The older man was aghast at being told that the younger woman had dated her husband’s brother before she dated her husband, while her husband smugly informed the table that he had “gotten it right the first time” and “in the game of keep-away, what matters is who gets it last.” I wanted to lean across the table, look only at the younger woman, and ask her if she also finds it strange the way some men speak of “their women” the way other men talk about the trophy kill they have mounted on the wall in their den. But I didn’t, because embarrassing a man in public—especially in front of “their woman”—is a serious faux pas. A man treating “his woman” like property in public? Perfectly acceptable, practically expected. I was there as my husband’s guest, invited because he had been the bride’s professor in college and she wanted to meet his family. I would not embarrass him. Like all women, I am used to seething silently.

Why is it that the “dying to self” sermons always seem to be given by men? It feels like a rhetorical question (if only because most sermons are given by men). The most generous answer is that the “Christ and the Church” analogy of marriage is as deeply embedded in Christian theology as is heaven and hell, and good Christian men are supposed to take that sacrificial shit seriously. Love her like Christ loves the church. Lead her like Christ leads the church. Die to yourself (put her needs before yours) like Christ died for the church. It sounds pretty on the surface, doesn’t it? But the insidious, subliminal message is: the husband is god.

If the husband is god to the wife, then it is the wife who must die to her self. She must mold herself to him, submit to his authority in every way, honor his opinions, ambition, preferences, and very self-hood more than her own; all this she must do if she wants her marriage to be blessed by god (translation: he provides financially for their family and doesn’t cheat on her or leave her). The responsibility to “do it right”—and by right-doing to invoke the blessing of the divine—is and has always been placed on the least divine among us. In our society, that means women. It is we, the daughters of Eve, eternally blamed for seducing “Man” into sin, who must die and die and die to make it right. And it is the Ultimate Man, the “last Adam,” who will be eternally credited for having saved us.