I remember my wedding day. It was like any other wedding, except that on that day I fully understood what a vow means. I recall the moment we completed our vows. Make no mistake, I really loved the man I had just married and truly wanted to be married to him. But there was a split second where I sensed that something was changing, shifting. And for me there was an ominousness in the air. Given how my marriage eventually ended, perhaps that was not strange. Perhaps I had a premonition. Who knows. But what was the shift I felt happening in my space?
To tell you the truth, the way my mind painted the picture of what had happened to me in that moment, was a fleeting image of an invisible gilded cage, slowly descending from out of nowhere, settling down around us, right there in front of our wedding guests. A beautiful one, but a cage none the less. As time went by, I soon discovered that I felt locked in, despite wanting to be where I was. It was a space society had convinced me was the only acceptable place for a woman to be. Married. Each person’s story is unique and my story has already been written about, so let’s leave it at that. What I can share with you, is that I saw my husband become aware of the gilded cage too. And it changed him. As much as he had chosen to take those vows with me, about our lives together, the shift I felt that day, happened to him too. He never said anything, but I could see he was aware of the gilded cage enclosing both of us. He had been there before, while for me it was a first. Eventually, I set us both free.
And then I could be honest with myself. I began looking at the spaces around me more closely. I remember wishing that other women had warned me before I took a vow that almost broke me as a person. Again, this was my experience. I am not saying all vows and marriages are cages. I’m saying mine had been, and my husband experienced the same. So I started really ‘seeing’ the spaces others found themselves in. I studied the faces of my friends and family members, and I looked at the realities of the clients in my law office. Years later I listened to the stories of the clients in my therapy room. I also became aware of the things people say when they try to convince themselves – and the world – that they were not in any kind of cage. They simply took a vow and intended to keep it. I am relieved that there are people who are able to share a love so deep that they perceive their joint gilded cage as a gift, a magical space where two souls can thrive and grow and love each other through all of life’s tough spots. It is good to know that marriage can be good, and does not have to represent a limiting prison.
But if a young woman or a young man about to be married asked me for advice, I would do my best not to pass on any negative perception around vows and marriages to them. But I would be honest, and I would tell them about my strange experience at the altar. Because each of us get to choose how we want to live. If we live our lives thinking all married people who appear to be happy, are indeed happy, we would end up walking into a situation with the perception that our chances of having a happy marriage are really great. But if married people were a little more honest, and stopped describing terrible marriages as ‘something one has to work at’, young people – male and female – might be a little less starry-eyed, and a little more discerning, before they make their vows. They might, like I eventually did, become aware that perhaps fewer marriages are as happy as society and Facebook would have us believe. I am sure they would still choose to get married, and that is fine. But perhaps they would not stay locked up for quite so long in any kind of cage shared with a partner who is cruel, narcissistic, selfish, and a bully. Those are not things one can ‘work at’.
In the end, life has to flow. Cages tend to prevent that. When the vows you took left you in a space where love can flow and you as a person can grow and experience life to its fullest potential, then your gilded cage becomes a castle shared with someone truly special. But if your wings got clipped so that you could fit into that cage, remember that you were meant to fly.
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