Achievement Unlocked: Marriage

In three days my husband and I will begin to celebrate our first anniversary as husband and wife. We have pictures to print up, dinner to plan, and a year full of moments to look back on. With a reminder of my own marriage so close, the subject has been on my mind for a while.

And during that while, I've seen the idea that marriage shouldn't be celebrated as an achievement. It's come up on social media time and time again for me: "Never celebrate marriage as an achievement."

The sentence just kind of stopped me in my tracks.

I think that idea is really very short-sighted and dismissive for a number of reasons. I do think marriage is an achievement: in fact, I think it's a very difficult one. I've been married for almost a year, so I'm a newbie, I admit.

But hear me out. This is going to be short and sweet -- I could write pages and pages on this topic.

Some people struggle seriously with interpersonal relationships, mental and physical illness, and disabilities. I am one of these people. So is my husband. For us, our marriage is a shared overcoming of our illnesses. I have been rendered suicidal and unable to leave my bedroom by my depression, and if you've never experienced that kind of absolute despair I can imagine that it would be hard to understand what it means to me, to work for a life together, a future, with another human being. It means clawing your way forward not just for your sake, but for your spouse's, against everything your brain can throw at you. And that's hard when you don't need three medications just to get through the day.

People have also struggled to be able to be legally recognized as married. The LGBT community in particular has fought a long legal and social battle to win the right to tie the knot. For many LGBT couples, being able to be married is a profound moment. I'm bi myself, and should I have fallen in love with a woman I most definitely would have wanted our marriage to be celebrated as a triumph over many years of state-sponsored and cultural barriers. My husband and I are privileged in that our marriage has the cultural recognition given to men and women in wedlock, but we don't forget that many people used to think, and still think, that LGBT people like us shouldn't have children together -- something that both of us want in the future of our marriage.

There have been many other barriers to marriage; these are the ones personal to be, and the ones I know the most about. But I want to take a step back and focus on marriage itself.

Marriage isn't something you achieve once and bam! you're done. It's not a single achievement. You work on your marriage each and every day that you're together with your spouse. You achieve it over and over again, in little ways and big ones. The argument you resolved, the moment of tenderness you shared, the experience you set out to have: all of these are achievements that build your marriage up, like a house made from many bricks. It's not just a ring and a party: a marriage is a very vulnerable place where you have to do some serious personal and interpersonal labor, and it's not always pretty. I love my husband and I know I am loved in return, and in some ways my marriage has been easy and natural for me, but at its core it is serious, constant and difficult work.

(I'm starting to get sick of the word "achievement" and I bet you are, too. There's no other word I can really use to make my point, though.)

I understand where the idea that "marriage isn't an achievement" comes from. People want to stress academic and professional achievements, especially for women, whose successes in these fields are often downplayed and overlooked. People also want to fight back against the popular idea that a marriage is necessary for a healthy adulthood, that a relationship "completes" a person. I've seen articles that stress that academic and professional achievements should be celebrated with the same pomp and parade that marriages are, and I don't disagree. We should raise up these successes, particularly women's successes, because they are important.

But we can do that without devaluing marriage as an achievement. And, I swear, this is the last time I'm going to say "achievement."

#marriage