WHY FIRST MARRIAGES ALWAYS FAIL

A parable of the human predicament and the fatal flaw in first marriages

Dr. Kelly Flanagan

Humi was born into a miracle.

Humi came from Nowhere. That’s what we call the place that is only spirit, with no substance.

Humi was curious about substance, though, so he came Here. That’s what we call this place where spirit and substance come together.

Whenever spirit enters into substance, it’s a miracle, so Here is a miracle. Humi, like every one of us, was born into it.

When he arrived Here, it was a great, gradual shock to Humi.

You see, when he was Nowhere, everything was One. All souls were together.

After he arrived Here, however, he found out all the souls had been separated by something called skin. It was hard to feel Oneness with skin on. Furthermore, all the souls who’d arrived well before him had built an additional fortress around themselves. The fortress was called ego. And inside their separate fortresses, they’d all forgotten they came from Nowhere. They had Oneness amnesia.

The forgetting scared Humi.

The forgetting wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part was the hurting. The way people wounded each other with their fortresses.

Rubbing up against someone’s fortress with your soul was like skinning your knee. Every day. All day. Eventually, Humi’s whole soul stung like a skinned knee. So, he faced a choice: keep getting hurt, or build a fortress of his own.

Humi, of course, built a fortress.

And like everyone else, he built a fortress with a dungeon beneath it. He put his pain down in the dungeon, and he built doors on the dungeon, and he closed the doors, and he got so busy becoming an adult that he barely remembered he’d done so. Over time, the sounds from the dungeon receded into the background, like car horns in a big city.

Then one day Humi met a person who seemed to silence the dungeon altogether. So, he opened the doors of his fortress to her, and she opened the doors of her fortress to him, and they were together. Even though neither of them remembered Nowhere nor Oneness, in some mysterious way, this togetherness made everything feel right again.

They wanted this feeling to last forever. So they invited everyone they knew to a great party where they announced they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, no matter how many hard things happened to them.

They called this agreement Marriage.

The Marriage had an official government contract. But it also had an unofficial, unspoken, unwritten contract that Humi and his spouse both understood, without ever having to acknowledge it. This contract contained three important agreements:

• We will pretend like neither one of us has a dungeon.
• We will go out of our way to never disturb the non-existent pain in each other’s non-existent dungeon.
• If the pain in one partner’s dungeon begins to make noise again, the blame for the pain will rest solely on their spouse, as if they caused it in the first place.

The Marriage agreement worked wonders for Humi and his partner until it didn’t.

The strange thing was, nothing particularly hard happened. Just jobs and children, mortgages and monotony, temptations and distractions, success and stress. Just substance-y things.

Until they woke up one day, and the feeling of togetherness was gone again.

It made the pain in the dungeon very loud, for both Humi and his partner. Not like car horns in the background. More like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Per the unspoken Marriage agreement, they blamed each other for the problem, and their fortresses closed to each other almost completely. Thus, they faced yet another great decision:

• Would they confess to themselves—and each other—that they had dungeons they’d built a long, long time ago?
• Would they admit to themselves—and each other—that there was already a great deal of pain stashed away in those dungeons when they first met each other?
• Would they share the floor plan of their respective fortresses, so they might learn how to walk around inside each other’s self-protections, and find their way to the dungeon doors?
• Would they open those doors for each other, haul out the pain together, and learn to feel it with each other so they wouldn’t have to defend it from each other?

Humi and his partner agreed to do just that. It wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t easy, but very gradually, and with great effort, they learned the deep, deep secret about how substance-y relationships really work: the more you share of someone’s pain, the more of their spirit you get to see. It’s how Oneness happens when you’re Here.

They called this new agreement their Second Marriage.

To Humi and his partner,

it felt like being born again,

into an even better miracle.

What’s your reaction to the two very different mindsets reflected in Marriage and Second Marriage? Do you have any marriage insights to add? Let us know in the comments—and feel free to leave any other reactions as well!