The joy of marriage, where fifty years is hardly enough time to experience it, is finding your completion in opposition. Men are not women and women are gloriously not men. The differences are slight, so slight they are hard to describe, but they are there and the longer you live with your spouse the more obvious they are.
One sort of feminism of the last century attempted to make men and women the same. Of course, men and women are equally human. A visitor from Mars might not be able to tell our sexes apart the differences are so slight, but we are not from Mars or Venus. Humans know the differences, which feel greater because they are so slight that we are always teased into thinking they are nothing, especially in our youth and under the power erotic, but end up looming larger as a result. Just as home conflicts can be slight but mighty, so the not-just-as-I-am differences between men and women loom huge. It can be irritating as women have always known. Some men think they want a man in a woman’s body . . . others that men would be better off without women at all and many women wonder why God created men at all. We are so irritating to each other. But there can be no marriage, no union of key with lock to open the door to two souls, without a man and a woman.
We need no mirror. One technological advance that has been, on the whole, a disaster is the availability of cheap and effective mirrors. They are everywhere and allow us to see ourselves in our own eyes. This is not, for all but the saints who know who they are, a great temptation. It is a temptation to love self or to loath self, but always to see self. The last thing a man needs is another man to reflect his maleness back to him.
I see myself now, best, in the eyes of my wife and I am changed in that place. She sees me, thank God, not as I am or even as I was when we married twenty years ago, but as I should be. There is nothing like that. It leads me forward. She civilizes me and she says, though I find it hard to imagine, that I have helped her become more herself as well. The difference is like a spice in a good meal, small but vital. This vision requires sticking it out through horrid times. It comes only