[Items here are arranged in the reverse-chronological order of posting.]

Quik-Find:

"June-Bride" Articles on Weddings and Marriage 

    Partners and Marriage   by Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz

    You Don't Have to Rush to the Wedding Altar   by Joydee C. Robledo

Father's Day Articles

    Challenge of Fatherhood: Parental Teamwork after Prenatal Physical Discrepancy  by SanibLakas

    Editorial: 'Father and Sun'   by Earthlite Sparks & Reflections

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"June-Bride" Articles on Weddings and Marriage (uploaded June 20, 2002)

Partners and Marriage 

By Eduardo Jose E. Calasanz  (date unknown)

I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives.

When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched, as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at
best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering days and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each other's presence.  They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each other's foibles.

It was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible.  How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the others habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each
other?

The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed.

It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset.  Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages.

Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination. Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual
attraction in order to see what is on the other side. This can work, but it can also leave a trail of
wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together. 

The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each other's laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept up into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.

This is the ideal, but not often possible. If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each others company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other
laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.

Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together.

After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect. When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the relationship ages
and grows, the outside world becomes important again.  If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can't accept, you will inevitably come to grief.

Look at the way she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful.  If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusp of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance does not become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.

So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts. I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word.

There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower.  The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know them
they would be impossible to believe.

Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good.   If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed.

We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger. It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the possibility that the first
heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter.

But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love. Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presences, two separate consciousness come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there are not traps.

Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes dulled to the richness that it alone contains.

But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one. Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation.  If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers. If not, then wait. The easy grace of
a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom...  endlessly.

(Eduardo Calasanz was a student at the Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines, where he had Father Ferriols
as professor. Father Ferriols, meanwhile at that time, was the Philosophy department head. Currently he still
teaches Philosophy for graduating college students in Ateneo.  Father Ferriols has been very popular for his mind-opening and enriching classes but was also notorious for the grades he gives. Still people took his classes for the learning and deep insight they take home with them every day (if only they could do something about the grades.....   Anyway, come grade giving time, (Ateneo has letter grading systems the highest being an A, lowest a D, with F for flunk), Fr Ferriols had this long discussion with the registrar people because he wanted to give Calasanz an A+. Either that or he doesn't teach at all... Calasanz got his A+.)

You Don't Have to Rush to the Wedding Altar

By Joydee C. Robledo, June 1998

IT’S JUNE. This is usually the favorite month for weddings. We see wedding announcements in the papers, adorned with sketches of bridal gowns. We get the invitations. We watch one bride or other, face aglow, marching down the aisle. We even get to sound spoon on glass, asking the couple to kiss for the nth time during the reception. We sigh. Often with happy misty eyes, we pray our best wishes for them.

Everything’s okay until the mind wanders off to a question that often comes in moments like this, "Why am I not yet married?" Only in marriage can a loving couple prove to each other and to the world that they are truly committed to one another, for better or for worse. How conveniently and profoundly said.

But what about those ladies and gentlemen who, even at their prime, are not likely to get married yet? Definitely not yet this June. Perhaps, not even next June, or the next. Why are their friends and relatives more enthusiastic than they to see them walk down the aisle? How can they resist when the pressures coming from their peers are becoming unbearable? How are they to take all that?

No response can be as simple as to answer these complicated questions. It’s a good thing there is always the available option not to answer them at all!

It is not the goal of this article to defend and uphold single-blessedness, nor discourage it. Much less to berate the still uncommitted and pressure them to rush to the nearest church before it’s "too late." Living by the dictates of the prevailing society has both its good and bad sides. It is really now up to the person how make all these unsolicited pieces of advice from all directions work for one’s best interests.

Unfortunately, many are trapped into thinking that unless they get married soon enough, people would not take them seriously. The reasons vary, depending on point of view. Some would conclude that a single person is not yet matured enough to handle such difficult responsibility, as if marriage were some heavy burden that one would like to shun. Others would make a single woman feel that getting married is some kind of duty or obligation that would haunt her as you long as she remained single, until she finally walked down the aisle to fulfill it.

Others believe and are even convincing their friends and relatives that settling-down is the only time where you really become intellectually and emotionally stable, to say the least.

There is an insight I learned from one book with respect to maturity or what the authors call "the myth" about it.

Shifting Gears (First Avon Printing, 1975), written by Nena O’Neill and George O’Neill, says that one of the promises of the "maturity myth" is that once we settle down into a job and marriage we will attain emotional security. According to the myth, emotional security depends to a great extent upon marriage and the raising of the family.

It is certainly true, of course, that a loving mate and children will normally enhance the emotional security of any individual. But the maturity myth ignores the fact that emotional maturity also has a great deal to do with the individual’s inner self, how she judges her own worth, and not just with her worth in the eyes of others.

The message is clear. One should not allow to be dragged into doing something which she or he is not prepared for. Getting married is one.

One of the most delicate and farthest-reaching decisions one has to make in life is that of tying the knot with a loved-one to become lifetime partners. It entails knowing oneself and one’s vision for a happy lifetime together. It entails finding a partner whose personality and vision of marriage and family life are compatible to one’s own. It entails having the loving couple develop their romantic chemistry enough to really mature into a profound mutually-rewarding partnership, without losing the excitement of romance. It also involves financial considerations.

If it is not only a question of preparedness, then it may help one to look deeper into the opportunities and blessings not readily visible in this lifetime, at this given moment. And give oneself more time to enjoy the liberty of being single and basically uncommitted, to really live and strive more for one’s own personal growth on her own terms.

Besides, getting married as an option when one is not yet committed is enormously better than wanting to become single again when one is already married. The latter is applicable, of course, only to couples who are unhappy in marriage and who ended up despising each other. So, who’s got the better deal in that case?

This position is not meant to harm anyone but only to give face to reality. So, are you among those who’d rush to the altar because it’s June?

Father's Day Articles (uploaded June 16, 2002)

Challenge of Fatherhood: Parental Teamwork

after Prenatal Physical Discrepancy

 By SanibLakas Foundation, June 2000

A SWIMMING HALF-SEED FROM A FATHER approaches and merges with a half-seed from a mother to form a complete seed of a new life incarnation. The merger takes place in that temple of miraculous synergy that we call the womb.  And the living seed grows for three quarters of a year in that same womb, sharing the mother's lifeblood, until it gets born into the world to breathe its own life. The mother cannot but feel intimately and intensely the whole growth process -- as in "feel na feel" -- until the climax of it all, the indescribable pain, glory and ecstasy of childbirth.  That intimate bond would naturally have a strong momentum: the mother, feeling a new vacuum within her own body, hugs in the infant very tightly for a long extended moment and has the natural drive to extend that hug forever. And the father? He wants to hug them both

Yes, he wants to hug his wife, his dearly beloved Lifepartner who had just gone through an ordeal which he could share only vicariously, and with whom he had just celebrated receiving a new longterm responsibility and gift. He wants to hug his little baby who fulfills his natural drive for personal fulfillment and for self extension, the fragile one who seems to ask everyone around for love and protection. 

But what does he feel of his biological bond with that baby based on his own physical experience of the role he had played in bringing forth this miracle of life into the world?  What can he recall by way of a direct role? The chores he had to perform while his wife was pregnant and indisposed?  No, the most direct physical role he ever can remember is the orgasm that he had which planted the swimming half-seed.  If there had been a whole series of such glorious moments before his wife missed a period, he can no longer possibly tell which ejaculation did it. And, really honestly now, during such moments of heavenly physical pleasure, it was very unlikely that the matter of begetting, the possibility of fatherhood, ever crosses his mind!  And so he wants to hug her wife all the more tightly. And, of course, he wants to hug the baby, too.

     Between the two parents, the mother has the momentum and natural instinct for closer physical intimacy with the child, especially with months or possibly even years of breastfeeding as next stage in the sequence.  She has been with the baby for all those prenatal months, aware of the baby's growth and motions all that time; he could only relate to her "growing tummy" and with memories of  his earlier orgasms inside her body when they, about nine months before, enjoyed the highest physical expression of their intimacy, love and life-partnership.

     The discrepancy is real. But it doesn't have to be absolute and permanent. The baby is now out of the womb. While the father can never breastfeed any baby, he can immediately start the physical bonding by giving his tender loving touches and gentle rubs often, as tender as his often crude physical ways can be tempered and trained by affection and determined self-control.  A father can consciously take time to make faces and "beautiful eyes" at his baby whenever he can, and get this baby to identify his face, his touch, and the sound of his voice fully with his love. 

     Of course, he can choose to read the newspaper or talk on the cellphone while his wife breastfeeds, and channel all his love for the baby through earning more and more money for the family, but that obviously won't help diminish the discrepancy in physical bonding. He would have then chosen to allow his own role to be boxed as that of "financier" and, probably, also as "disciplinarian" -- to be thanked and feared by his children while they feel much closer to Mom.  No father deserves to do that to himself or be allowed by his wife to do that to himself.

     As soon as the baby is born and throughout the ensuing childhood, adolescence and even adulthood, the father can play about as many roles as the mother can in relating directly with his child (their child forever) physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. After all, between the two parents, it should neither be a contest nor a defeatist overreaction to the prenatal physical discrepancy, but a parental teamwork to anchor and lead a wholesome family synergy and security.  Fatherhood can only be fully enjoyed or appreciated within this warm-home framework.

     Happy Father's Day, everyone! Yes, to every father and every one who loves fathers.

An Editorial:

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