Does "'Till Death Do Us Part" Mean Anything Any More?

The nature of commitment

An ancient couple, married for many decades, hobble slowly into a family lawyer’s office. They croak, “We want a divorce.” The surprised lawyer asks “After all these years? Why now?” The couple choruses, “We were waiting for the kids to die.”

We all know that half or so marriages end in divorce, and that nearly every one of those couples made sincere commitments to stay together. Here I explore the vow of commitment in marriage. I think most people who make a lifelong commitment today are missing out on a chance to make a commitment infused with the true meaning of love. I will use the terms ‘marry’ and ‘marriage’ to encompass all types of lifelong commitment, and ask you for your forbearance with this linguistic shortcut. When I mention marriage, I refer to all forms of long-term commitment to an intended life-partner, whether through official marriage or otherwise. You might believe that marriage is a sacred institution, or that it is outdated, or both, or something else. Let’s save that debate for another time.

When we marry, we typically vow “‘Till death do us part”, or otherwise promise to be together our whole lives. This is often broken. Should we instead say “I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband, only for as long as we both want to be married followed by any statutory minimum period to divorce, according to the laws of the state in which we reside at the time of any such decision…”? Of course not; notwithstanding the unromantic notion of presaging divorce at the wedding, there is value in commitment.

The Ulysses Contract

When Hernando Cortez landed on the shores of the Yucatan to conquer the Aztec empire with just 500 soldiers, he ordered his boats be burned, cutting off any possible retreat and motivating his soldiers to win - or die. It worked: they prevailed where many before them had perished. The Ulysses contract was named after the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses wished to hear the irresistibly beautiful songs of the Sirens. Everyone who had hitherto sailed nearby had been lured to their deaths on the Sirens’ treacherous rocks. Ulysses instructed his crew to bind him tightly to the ship’s mast, to block their own ears with beeswax, and not to release him under any circumstances. Upon hearing the Sirens’ songs, he begged the crew to release him, but they faithfully ignored him and he became the only person in history to hear those impossibly beautiful songs and live. Thus was born the Ulysses Contract, a decision intended to bind oneself to a course of action in the future.

Successful long-term partnerships of all types, including marriage, aren’t always ‘rainbows and butterflies’. There are hard times, and there can be moments when you doubt the feeling of connection with your partner. A commitment can act as a Ulysses Contract, a way to prevent us from quitting at the first sign of trouble. The social pressure and the importance of keeping the promise we made can encourage us to turn toward our partner in tough times, for example by sharing difficult emotions we’re going through and trusting our partner to listen.

This only goes so far: if we make a promise to be together until death, and that turns out to be the wrong decision, is it ok to break that promise? There’s no right answer: it’s a question of values, and in particular the importance of your word compared to your quality of life. Imagine after years of a difficult marriage and trying hard to make it work, you find yourselves both unhappy, frequently triggered by each other, and exposing your kids regularly to extreme conflict. You might feel that the opportunity for happier, more peaceful lives for everyone involved is more important than the commitment you made. Or you might decide that the commitment was unbreakable: religious people are 14% less likely to divorce, possibly because they made that commitment not just to their partner but to God. For most, there is some level of suffering at which the commitment can reasonably be called off, especially if there is a feeling that the other person has already broken their side of the bargain first (infidelity is cited in over half of divorces). Physical abuse is a sadly-too-common example of a situation where few would judge another for breaking their commitment.

Let’s review where we are so far. In a nutshell: marriage commitments are often broken but they’re still valuable, as they help us ‘burn our boats’.

There’s a missing piece in all this. If I commit to running a 4 hour marathon one year from today, and I don’t bother training for the first 11.5 months, I’m going to fail. Similarly, if I commit to a lifetime of joy with my partner and I don’t do anything to make that happen, the relationship is going to fail. Going to therapy when we already can’t stand the sight of each other isn’t likely to help any more than training really hard for those final 2 weeks before the race after having sat on the couch watching TV and slurping sodas all year.

Love isn’t just a feeling, it’s also a verb. It’s something we can choose to do actively every day - why not commit to that too?

The Missing Piece

My friends Anna and Dani, whose story and real names are included here with their permission, were experiencing conflict in their relationship because Anna wanted marriage and Dani didn’t. For Dani, the idea of a ‘forever’ commitment rang false. He felt that a binding promise on your future self is unethical, because you have no idea what life will throw at you. He was against the idea that successful relationships must last until death. What if you shared something amazing together and then decide to go your own ways when your interests diverge? Shouldn’t that be beautiful and celebrated, rather than a ‘failure’? He felt that a life-long commitment itself would do little to ensure a happy relationship. For Anna, she knew she wanted commitment from Dani, and had always equated that with marriage. Growing up in England, she had come to expect that marriage was the natural step in a long-term relationship that was going so well. Initially Anna perceived Dani’s reluctance to marry as a lack of commitment to her and their relationship, and he saw her desire for commitment as a request for something that couldn’t reasonably be given.

As they explored these ideas together, they each learned something. Anna realized that the commitment she wanted was a shared intention to build their lives together. Dani realized that if they viewed themselves as a long-term team and poured their energy into loving each other, that would lead to the most fulfilling possible lives together. For both of them, they wanted to make decisions together for the long-term, involving things like moving half-way across the world. They came to an agreement: that they would work on their relationship every day, putting in the kind of effort you would if you wanted it to last forever. And they would make decisions as though on a ‘joint life project’ together (Dani’s words). They both felt truly excited and fulfilled in this agreement.

Today, Anna and Dani remain joyfully together. They held a celebration of their shared intention with their friends. They’re still working on their relationship like it will be their last. This illustrates the piece that is often missing from both wedding vows and the daily experience of marriages: if you invest in your relationship like you want it to last until death, then it might do just that.

My suggested vows

The only time you can impact your relationship is now. The future is only a possibility until it arrives, and you have no control over it other than what you can do in each of the string of nows that stretch out before us all. So, to me, the most important part of any marriage vow should be the promise of how you will act each day. The promise of how long the marriage will last is less important not because you don’t want the marriage to last, but because acting like love is a verb is the best chance you have to create an incredible marriage that lasts. Something like this:

Every day of our lives together, I pledge to cherish you, to love you, to listen to you, to invest deeply in our partnership so it goes from strength to strength.

Now let’s add in the lifelong commitment part. I like making this commitment feel like a Ulysses contract without getting bogged down in the semantics of whether the promise might possibly be an unrealistic one to make. It is beautiful and romantic to make a lifelong commitment, and at my own wedding it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Something like:

I willingly and joyfully bind my soul to yours.

When Roxy and I got married, we shared the below vows. I would probably write mine slightly differently now, but I think we did ok.

Tom. Roxy, we talk about our love as a tree. As our tree ages, it grows, deepening its roots and strengthening its branches, standing in the forest of our community.

I vow to water our tree by loving you with all my heart and investing in our love with all my energies, so it flourishes into a giant redwood. I promise you a lifetime - in fact, many lifetimes worth - of joy, laughter and love.

Roxy. Tom: I vow to nurture our tree until its branches span the sky and its roots fill the earth. To live by our values, inspiring you to be the best version of yourself. To let love guide me, with my life joined to yours into eternity.

How do we invest in our relationship and nurture our tree? That’s a topic for another day.