Thread by @Mrpossidez

The greatest value of marriage for me, is the bet of friendship and nothing reveals how precious and necessary that is, than adulthood. To have someone who is even willing to listen to you and understand you at all, is nothing short of a miracle.

When you’re young, friendship is abundant. Love feels infinite, you don’t even notice it. You’re surrounded by people who get your jokes, share your references, care about your becoming, because you all share lots of similarities, maybe too many.

But adulthood has a silent filter. It doesn’t announce what it’s taking from you, it just takes. It moves people around gently and subtly, dizzying from one end to the other, until one day you realize the people you could once call without explanation are no longer within reach.

By the time you’re middle-aged, you start to realize how very much you need your friends. By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away. You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics.

So much happens in the course of a lifetime that not only consume your friends’ time and attention, but also often reveal certain things about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible. Those are brutal.

It is in adulthood that it properly hits you and you realize something I’ve always known, but took sometime to articulate: that witnessing is rare and consistent attention (even when genuine) is rarer than you think.

I’m talking about the kind of attention that stays when you’re unsure who you are. When you’re boring. Or scared, or stupid. Or worse, lost. The attention of someone who doesn’t just tolerate your repetition, but accepts that your repetition is the point.

It is miraculous enough that anyone can look you in the eyes and promise to be the primary witness to your life. In virtually all conditions. Now imagine how much of a miracle it is to actually have someone willing and actually being that witness.

What makes it precious, is not merely because it’s nice to have a witness to our lives, but because who we are is a story we retell to the people who let us tell it. Someone has to let us be. We’re all perpetual stories, not bulwarks against stasis.

This is, I think, the radical promise of marriage. That someone, while actively dealing with their own life, will bear witness to the slow, private erosion of your own self and still call it beautiful. Or at least refuse to call it ugly.

That someone, while actively dealing with their own life, will stay with you even after the narrative thread of your best self frays into something smaller, quieter, and more fragile. Physically, mentally and otherwise.

And as life pulls away your crowd, that kind of presence begins to feel like a miracle. To have even one person who witnesses you, when you’re no longer at your best, when life has taken from you the illusion that anyone is truly easy to love, is no small thing.

Of course, you’ll have friends; those are the flora and fauna of our lives. But they are all vulnerable to time, growth, children, distance, and even success. With any luck, you find a friend and a lifetime witness in one person, who’s hoping you choose them, too.

And to be clear, marriage doesn’t always deliver this promise. But its ideal, its deepest potential, is to offer a chosen witness who keeps showing up, maybe not endlessly romantically, but stubbornly enough to allow you retell and rediscover yourself.

When I think about it, it’s both beautiful and a bit chilling for me. I worry about how great ‘witness’ I can be. And assuming that wouldn’t be a problem, I still worry if I’m courageous enough to allow someone fully see me. I wonder if I even deserve that.