Going the Second Mile--Together

Published April 5, 1979. It is interesting what students literally bring to a class on marriage and family. Not long ago one follow brought a third generation copy of an article his mother had given him as he left home to attend college. She like myself, was trying to give him some insights about marriage and prepare him for the forthcoming adventure in his life.

The two short paragraphs he had were written over 30 years ago and were taken from a sermon of William E. Wiekenden, a lay minister in the Congregational Church of Jaffrey, New Hampshire. His sermon was given on August 10, 1947 and was simply titled “Marriage.” The source of the material was not given.

Here are the thoughts of Mr. Wiekenden.

Then there are the two miles of marriage and family life. How quickly the glamour of courtship, the exaltation of the wedding ceremony, and the new found intimacies of the honeymoon descend to the drudgery of earning and economizing, the drab routine of cooking and dishwashing, or of furnace-tending and lawn-mowing, and the difficult or even exasperating process of mutual adjustment, on a lifetime rather than a weekend basis.

How quickly the experience of parenthood with its unique expansion of the ego, does ends to the plane of slavery to bottles and formulas, of midnight feedings, of diapers and washtubs, of staying in nights, and of doing without generally.

Just about the time the first mile of martial compulsion begins to seem endless, the young couple answers that a successful marriage is not even a lucky break or for that matter a heaven-sent boon, but rather one of the most exacting of human achievements and one of the most rigorous of personal disciplines. The simple truth is that the finest human product cannot be achieved in isolation, nor by an unlimited exaltation of the individual selfhood, but through the merged personality of a man and woman who are willing to pay the price by going the second mile.

Wiekenden’s thoughts take me back to an incident that occurred some years ago while I was a teenager. There was a prominent married couple in our small community in southern Utah. Both were highly devoted to each other and were in the process of raising a family. Some of their children were older than myself; some were younger.

Besides operating a successful cattle ranch and farm, the husband and wife were prominent in civic, community, and church activities.

One afternoon the woman stopped by to visit my mother, who had not yet returned from shopping. Since I was the only one home, we began talking and somehow got on the subject of marriage.

She observed that for some young couples it’s just as easy to fall “out of love” as it is “to fall into love” if those involved are prone to falling. I remember so distinctly how she told me that people must learn to work at being happily married just like they would work at anything else in life that is worthwhile.

She also noted that husbands and wives change over the years and must learn to adapt to these changes in order to keep the marriage going and growing. How impressed I want to hear these insights from a woman who I believed was truly happy in her marriage.  Those few minutes of conversation have somehow stayed with me over the years.

My thanks for my student, his mother, William E. Wiekenden, and the woman in southern Utah, wherever they are, for some helpful insights on marital interaction. Perhaps marriage would be more meaningful if we concentrated on the second mile of service rather than the first mile of conclusion.