Some Un-sage Marriage Advice: Dance or Die

Is it better to be static or be moving?

Is it better to be stood still or be going somewhere?

My best mate is getting married in a few weeks’ time, which makes me feel like I ought to be dispensing sage advice. Unfortunately however, having been married less than two years and usually having the emotional intelligence of a cuddly dalek, I don’t have much sage-ness to pass on. All I could think of, was to compare it to the camp for disadvantaged young people that the two of us have been volunteering on for the last few years! (No offence meant to Rachael, genuinely, as you’ll see!)

Thing is we’ve always said about Falcon (that’s the camp) that it’s the hardest and the best week of the year. Now have you ever noticed that that’s a surprisingly common combination? That what’s hard is often also deeply joyful? That being easy and comfortable, and feeling fully alive don’t actually come together very often? And the reason is, at least on Falcon, that pretty much all day every day, you’re not asking yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing?’, you’re asking yourself, ‘How can I make that kid happier? How can I show them love? How can I help them have a good holiday?’ And then you go do it. And the weird thing is, that’s hard work, and it usually involves doing something you don’t feel like doing, but at the end of the day you feel both exhausted and alive.

Why is that?

I read something brilliant the other day that compared life to a dance. Or actually to planets and gravity – it was kind of a mixture of the two. And it pointed out that usually, what we want is for other people to orbit around us. We want to be the centre, not necessarily of attention, but in the sense of everything revolving around our feelings and our desires. But this book asked a brilliant question: if we all demand that everyone else revolve around us, what happens? Everyone just stands still. Imagine a dance where everyone is waiting for everyone else to dance around them. It’s the most boring dance ever. It doesn’t even count. They’re all just standing there, murmuring and twitching their heads at each other getting increasingly frustrated that the others won’t do what they want! The whirling, spinning, leaping delight of the dance never happens.

But imagine instead, a dance where everyone is trying to revolve around everyone else. Everyone wants to orbit around the others, and make them the centre. You see now I’m imagining something much more exciting – much more beautiful. What comes into my head is one of those spirograph drawings we used to do when we were kids – what you’d get would be complicated and intricate and fast! Weaving and whirling in and out and around, always moving, always interacting. It’s what the very best bits of a barn dance or a ceilidh feel like, or actually the most beautiful and satisfying moves in a game like football, or some of the most breath-taking moments on Planet Earth or whatever with vast shoals of fish or murmurations of starlings. Whatever you’re imagining, this feels very much alive. Whereas everyone standing there, waiting for the others to revolve around them, actually isn’t all that different to being dead.

And that’s why Falcon makes you feel alive. Because you spend all day revolving around other people – and that’s the dance we were made for. And I was trying to tell my best mate that that’s what marriage is aiming for – that’s what it’s meant to be – is two people revolving around each other, 24-7, wanting to put the other person at the centre, and in the process creating a dance that is beautiful and tender and alive. But that’s hard work. It doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally is a grumpy grinding to a halt as you demand that the other person orbits around you.

And the thing is if you’re with me up to this point this should be raising a pretty big question. How come what comes naturally and what makes us feel alive are not the same thing? I mean that’s so obviously the case that we come to take it for granted and we happily write and read a thousand life-coaching books on exercise or mindfulness or destressing or relationships without ever asking ourselves, why on earth isn’t it natural for us to do what makes us feel alive? Why isn’t it automatic?

And there’s a lot that we could talk about there, because there’s plenty of intermediate reasons and issues and all of that, but I want to suggest a reason basic enough, fundamental enough, for a problem that’s so fundamental to our lives.

We were made for the dance, but we’ve got used to being out of it. The thing is, when Jesus turned up he gave us a glimpse of God. He turned up revolving around others, pulling them in to revolve around him and bringing them to life in the process (sometimes literally!) but at the same time telling us that he’d been doing this forever. That he had always existed and that he and his Father and their Spirit had been loving each other, giving each other glory, revolving around each other and putting each other in the centre since before the world was made. And we would have all called him a lunatic if he hadn’t been so, beautifully sane! If his madness hadn’t been unravelling the twisted knots of people’s lives and hearts and showing them how to be properly human again! And the closer you look, the closer the listen, the more it becomes inescapably, wonderfully obvious that this dance of love that Jesus is living, and talking about, and drawing people into – it’s what it means to be alive. It’s what we are made for. Because it is quite literally what we were made for!

But there’s something very deeply stupid about us that makes us want to be at the centre, makes us want to stand still and have the world and other people revolve around us, makes us want to not bother with the hard work of revolving around God and other people. Something very deeply stupid that prefers grinding to a self-centred gridlock than whirling and diving in other-centred movement. Something that, if given the choice, would actually rather stand on the spot and shrivel up than move and dance and grow.

And if you don’t believe me, try being married. Try living with someone else and trying to love them all the time. Any impression you may have of yourself that you are naturally selfless will fade very swiftly indeed! We are not naturally other-centred, we don’t naturally jump into the dance. But that’s not cos it’s unnatural or unhealthy – it’s because there is something unnatural and unhealthy about us! The dance is our truer nature; the dance is our real life.

So there you go mate. Amateur sage-ness dispensed. Happy wedding!