Last post, I said:
"In the Russian church, they crown each wedding couple as martyrs to each other. Not a top and a bottom, nor a pair of equals, but two mutual sacrifices."
I need to dig into that a little more.
Notice, for example, how Americans don't really do the mutual sacrifice thing. Not as an ideal.
We also don't do the top/bottom thing, at least not outside the bounds of negotiated alternatives or crypto-kinky religious subcultures. (I'm lookin' at you, evangelicals.)
With those exceptions, Americans are a consciously egalitarian bunch. The degree of our egalitarianism has fluctuated, but for the most part, we like the "pair of equals" designation. It sounds right to us. It's Constitutional, after all--"that all men were created equal," and so on.
We tend to interpret "equal" in light of our other Constitutional biggie, "the pursuit of happiness."
The Russian crowning, though, symbolizes a different *kind* of equality. In a way, quite literally, it means you're equally screwed. (Russians raise pessimism to the level of the sublime.)
Americans don't want to hear that. We want to imagine that our marriages are for *us* and will benefit *us.*
As inheritors of a Puritan legacy, we are certainly willing to hear that this will take work. Nobody can absorb lectures about hard work like an American. We have an endless capacity to sit there and be told that we must WORK! at our relationships and WORK! on our issues and WORK! on our spiritual lives and WORK! on getting/staying in shape or conversely WORK! on accepting our bodies and then WORK! for justice or righteousness, whichever flavor you prefer.
This must mean we're phantasmagorically lazy, on the theory that cultures only lecture themselves about things they *don't* do. (If you pick up a medieval etiquette manual, for example, and it says "When thou eateth, useth thine fork!", you can be pretty sure that they didn't-eth.)
In any case, Americans don't like to feel that we're giving anything up. Generally, I agree with this. I believe in self-actualization.
But the interesting thing about self-actualization is that its meaning is actually wider than we assume. We assume that growth and development mean "upward." Very often they do. But not always, and not in every area. Sometimes growth means "outward" or even "downward." Roots, for example, grow down.
And the branches won't get as high as they can if the roots don't go as deep.
