I'm Married

It Takes a Village to Raise a Marriage

The last time I wrote here, I called the piece You Are Invited. I wrote about two big changes taking shape in my life: the slow beginnings of the ARC Network, and my coming wedding.

We made a website where people could participate in the ritual from wherever they were, even if they could not join us in person. Many people did. Blessings and well wishes came from all over the world—including, I imagine, from some of you reading this now.

Thank you. Your care became part of the weave of support around us.

I want to let you in a little further—to tell you what happened and how I am beginning to make sense of it.

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Just before Michal and I said our vows, I looked out at the people gathered in front of us.

My friends. My family. The people I have practiced with, struggled with, failed with, repaired with. Each face held a different history. A different intimacy. A different path by which we had arrived together at this moment.

My body braced.

This is too much.

Too much love. Too much goodness. Too many people whose hope and care I could feel at once. It was as if the relationships that had made my life had all become visible in a single moment, and my nervous system did not know how to receive them.

Then something shifted.

Oh no. This is normal. This is just how it is. This is normal.

I don’t mean normal as in ordinary. I mean that something in my body seemed to expect this—to have known it, beneath the parts of me that were overwhelmed. The love did not begin to feel smaller. It began to feel like ground.

My heart opened further into my chest, further into my body.

And I knew: Yes. This is right.

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I have written before that friendship is the whole of the path. The deeper I go, the more simply true it becomes.

The wedding showed me another face of the same recognition:

It takes a village to raise a marriage.

We usually speak about marriage as a bond between two people. Legally, that is true. Romantically, that is often how it is imagined. Two people choose one another. Two people make promises. Two lives become joined.

But that is not what the ritual felt like.

It felt like Michal and I were being bound to each other inside a much larger field of relationship—and the people gathered with us were being bound to us, and to the care of our marriage.

They were not spectators watching a private promise. Their presence was part of what made the promise real.

Marriage is a potent ritual technology. A ritual does not merely express something that already exists. When it works, it changes something. It gives love a form—public, embodied—and asks everyone present to remember what has been promised.

Jordan Hall held the ceremony. Cheryl Hsu, Sabra Saperstein, Dechen McSweeney, and Peter Park each helped hold the ritual in different ways. My friend BI made cacao for everyone. Our families and friends planned, cooked, carried, and attended to a thousand details. The day depended on all of them.

There is no version of me capable of standing beside Michal and making those vows that was not formed through friendship. My friends have held me while I cried, while I was lost, while I was in pain. We have disappointed one another, collided, repaired, and stayed. They have taught me that conflict does not mean the end of love—to trust truth more, to recognize goodness, to keep faith with relationship when disappearing would have been easier.

The people in front of us had not merely helped put on a wedding. They had helped make me into someone who could be married.

And through the ritual, I could feel them becoming part of the village that would help raise the marriage itself.

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I used to believe that the further you go on the path, the less support you need.

I thought development, practice, and transformation would make me more powerful, more capable of standing on my own. Support might be necessary at the beginning, but eventually I would become the kind of person who no longer needed so much of it.

My experience has been almost exactly the opposite.

I don’t know how far along any path I am, but one thing has become clearer: the more life asks of me, the more support I need. The more responsibility I take, the more visible my dependence becomes.

Growing up seems less like becoming independent and more like seeing how profoundly interdependent I have always been.

Since the wedding, I have moved out of my apartment and into the house where I used to visit Michal. What had been her house is now our house. We live here as husband and wife, unpacking, building routines, negotiating space, and learning what it means to share a home.

Beneath that work—beneath all of it—is a new stability. I can feel how supported I am.

The simplest thing I can say is that feeling supported gives me more to give. Not because I need less care, and not because I have become someone new. I am simply spending less energy trying to hold myself up. Some of that energy is becoming available for Michal, our families and friends, the people I work with, perhaps our children one day, and, in whatever small ways are mine, the wider web of life and relationship that holds us.

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I don’t know exactly what language to use for the deepest layer of this.

Life is on my side.

Life is good.

God is good.

Each phrase makes some part of me cringe. Each is also close to what I sense to be true.

What I can say is that I feel supported in a way that exceeds the plans and explanations of my rational mind. There is an intelligence moving all things. It supports life, and I am not outside of life. I am woven into it.

I trust that unfolding more than I used to. The ritual of marriage deepened and stabilized that trust.

This sense of support is already changing the kinds of risks I am willing to take.

In building the ARC Network, we had expected to charge for membership. In the week leading up to the opening, we decided not to. That means relinquishing revenue I had imagined would help sustain the project and create security for my family.

And yet not charging feels true to the soul of the project. We are trusting that the support the project needs will find it, the way support has been finding me.

I can make that choice because I feel supported—because I no longer feel that I have to create security alone. My marriage, my friendships, and the larger current moving through them make it possible to risk more for love.

Courage is rarely as individual as we imagine. Perhaps we become capable of risking ourselves for love simply because we recognize that love has always already been holding us.

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We have been married for about six weeks. Nothing about the wedding means that we have figured marriage out. The vows bound us to the ongoing work of returning, repairing, discerning, giving, receiving, and choosing each other again. And because we made them inside a village—inside real relationships—that work does not belong only to us.

Michal and I said our vows to each other. But we did not say them alone. The village heard them. The village made them possible. And in some way I am only beginning to understand, the village will help us keep them.

This is normal.

Not easy. Not guaranteed. Not something any of us can do without great care.

But normal in the deeper sense: love beneath us as ground, many hands holding what matters, and the courage to bind ourselves to love’s daily practice.

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And now I am back.

Michal and I are settling into the rhythms of our new life. I feel more present in my life again. I have several essays taking shape that I am excited to share with you, and I expect to be writing here more often.

The ARC Network has also had its opening ritual. That felt significant. It is open now. If you feel some resonance, or are simply curious, you are welcome to step closer. Just know that the ARC is still a tiny baby of a project. It is not mature. For some people, that is exciting. For others, it sounds like a hassle. Both are right.

I will write again soon.