HITCHED

Fifty-seven years ago, Frank sang that they go together like a Horse and Carriage.

Love and Marriage.

These days, they have gone the way of the Horse and Buggy.

 
Quaint. Outdated.

Consider Love and Marriage in the news this week:

As catalyst to destruction and untimely death. Talk of Whitney Houston’s tragic fate highlights the influence of ex-husband Bobby Brown and the reality TV show that aired the couple's crumbling marriage, drug use, lifestyle excess and bad behavior – a show that “sent Houston's reputation…to new lows," a show Houston claimed she did to try and save her marriage.

As passé. The New York Times reports that for the first time in history, more than half of the babies born to American women under the age of 30 occur outside of marriage: “Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America.”

The words of Amber Strader, 27:“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now. Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

The words of Teresa Fragoso, 25: “Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore. We support ourselves. We support our kids.”

As politics. Stating that “The institution of marriage is too serious to be treated like a political football,” New Jersey Governor Christie called for state voters to decide whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal- rather than politicians and the courts.

As the road not taken. The remarkable and dramatic story of Dolores Hart leaving a promising Hollywood career to live a cloistered spiritual life behind the walls of the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut is documented in an Oscar nominated Best Documentary Short Subject film God Is The Bigger Elvis. On the verge of signing a million-dollar contract during her short, but successful film career, Hart chose God - and 48 years of convent life - ultimately becoming a Mother Prioress instead of a movie star. 

Rebecca Cammisa directed the film, chronicling Hart’s choices and life in the abbey. “Here you have a young woman who at age 23 had it all," she says. "Her next two leading men were Beatty and Brando. But at 23 she left. She also had a fiancee. She decided that world wasn’t for her. That was pretty amazing.”

  
Hart’s fiancee, Don Robinson, became her lifelong friend. In an interview in 2004, Robinson divulged that after Dolores became a nun, he never married. The night she told him of her decision, it was a shock, but by the next day he had accepted it. "I was crushed," he said. "...Are you kidding? I'm a human being. I loved her deeply and still do, and I always will." Robinson had relationships with other women, but they "never worked." He visited Hart at the abbey every year until his death this past December.

(Sidetrack to an old, but amusing and relevant anecdote from that same 2004 interview. Actress Patricia Neal revealed that she wrote her autobiography at the abbey so she could confide in her friend of 30+ years. "It was a good place to write a book," she said. "I told (Mother Dolores) I was having trouble with my husband." (Her husband was Roald Dahl.) "He had problems….He found another lady. He's dead now.")

Sigh. Old Blue Eyes sang that song with such verve.
 
"Love and marriage, love and marriage
It's an institute you can't disparage…"

But disparaged, it is.

 
So what’s a really fortunate, happily married (most-of-the-time) old gal to do with all of this?

Write a blog In The Defense of Marriage.

Not today.  I'm already blogged down in this post.

So I looked for happier Love and Marriage news, and discovered that Clooney says he hasn't totally ruled out the idea of one day settling down for good.

His buddy Brad wants to marry his girl, too.

And there's always Matthew and Mary: She in a stunning, sleeveless gown and satin gloves, he in a tux, declaring their love in a fairy-tale snowfall, outside a window that illuminates the roaring fire in their castle-to-be.

Or Bates and Anna, declaring a love for each other that will transcend the hangman’s noose.

Oh, yeah.

Downton Abbey is fiction. A time period sandwiched between Horse and Carriage and Frank.

Nonetheless, as the institution of marriage transitions in this present day era, it’s worthwhile to consider a quote from Downton Abbey's brilliant character Lady Violet: “Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.”

Thank goodness we have a place called marriage where players can appear ridiculous, and be loved, regardless.

QUING Hereby Re-Decrees (from Shakespeare, via Daughter):   Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, nor bends with the remover to remove... If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.