The Plural I

There is something peculiar about the bonds of family that we often recognize without much thought. With the exception of our spouse, we do not choose the people who make up our family. We are born into a link of relationships that precedes us: parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, histories, traditions, joys, and wounds. Before we have much sense of ourselves as individuals, we already belong to others. We are someone's son or daughter, someone's brother or sister, someone's grandchild. In a very real sense, there is a "we" that exists before we have learned to say "I."

Marriage is different because it begins with a choice. Of all the people in the world, we choose one person and make the rather extraordinary promise that his or her life will henceforth be bound to our own. Yet marriage quickly becomes something larger than the choice that preceded it. To marry is to discover that another person's history, family, hopes, and burdens have in some meaningful sense become one's own. The "I" does not disappear, nor should it, but marriage introduces a new word into the vocabulary of the self: we.

We observe this change first in the initial language of married life. Where will we live? What are we doing for Christmas? Where do we want to go to Church? These are mundane questions, but they reveal something profound: there are goods that are neither simply mine nor yours, but ours. There are also problems, responsibilities, and decisions that are ours.

This is where the "we" is more than a sentimental description of family life. To belong to this "we" means that I have surrendered the right to regard myself as the only measure of my decisions. This "we" means sacrifice; and it means that sometimes I will surrender something genuinely good because another good now makes a legitimate claim upon me. Simply put, it means that my time is no longer entirely mine, nor can my plans be constructed as though no one else's flourishing is bound up with my own. Love does not merely give me another person to enjoy; it gives me someone for whom I am responsible.

Sacrifice, however, should not be confused with simply losing things. The sacrifices of family life reveal that human beings are capable of desiring goods larger than ourselves. A husband may give up an opportunity because his family needs stability, or a wife may carry more of the burden during a difficult season because her husband cannot. Both will spend money on things they would never purchase for themselves and give hours to activities they would never have chosen on their own. None of this makes much sense if the purpose of life is maximizing individual preference. It only makes perfect sense if another person's good has actually become part of my own.

This "we" also means responsibility so that in family life a person cannot easily move to claim that another person's difficulty is simply his or her problem. A spouse's struggle becomes a family concern, just as a child's struggle at school changes the household. Illness rearranges everyone's schedule, and anxiety in one member can alter the atmosphere of the entire home. We may not be able to solve one another's problems, and healthy families certainly require appropriate boundaries, but belonging means that we cannot remain entirely untouched by them. The burdens of those we love become, in some measure, burdens we carry together.

The same can be said of joy in this context of "we." A child's accomplishment is something the whole family celebrates, just as a spouse's success should be a source of genuine pride even when others in the family receive no direct benefit from it. Family trains us to rejoice in a good precisely because it belongs to someone else. In this way, the "we" does something rather remarkable: it expands the range of things capable of becoming my joy.

As well, the "we" in family is apparent in fidelity. Every family eventually endergoes periods when affection is easy and periods when it is not. Marriage vows anticipate this from the very first moment the words are exchanged from the lips of the spouses: better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health. The vows are astonishing precisely because they promise belonging in circumstances that cannot yet be known. The "we" is therefore not merely a description of how we feel about one another when family life is going well. It is a commitment to remain for one another when feelings fluctuate, circumstances change, and belonging becomes costly.

For that reason, the "we" also requires forgiveness. There is no family in which people belong deeply to one another without eventually wounding one another. The greater the intimacy, the greater our capacity both to love and to hurt. Family life requires the humility to say that I was wrong, the courage to ask forgiveness, and the generosity to extend it. Without forgiveness, the accumulated weight of daily failures eventually makes belonging to one another impossible. A family is not a community of people who never fail one another; it is, at its best, a community in which failure does not get the final word.

Children make this all even more visible. The "we" created in marriage expands, and suddenly the claims upon our lives multiply. Parents give away things that once belonged almost entirely to themselves: sleep, quiet, schedules, weekends, privacy, and an astonishing amount of time spent driving somewhere. Our decisions about careers, homes, finances, vacations, and even what we do on a Saturday morning begin to take into account people who may have little awareness of how thoroughly they have rearranged our lives.

Yet children also reveal something important about sacrifice: much of what we surrender is surrendered for a future we may never fully possess ourselves. We save for their education, while teaching habits whose fruits may appear years later. We establish traditions because we hope they will remember these traditions when they have homes of their own. We discipline when it would be easier to give in, insist upon responsibilities when doing the task ourselves would be faster, and try to form virtues whose full consequences we may never observe. Parenthood trains us to invest ourselves in a good whose fulfillment belongs substantially to another person.

The family therefore stretches the "we" not only across persons but across generations. A family is more than the collection of individuals currently living beneath one roof. We inherit names, stories, traditions, habits, beliefs, virtues, and sometimes wounds from people who came before us. We tell our children stories about grandparents and great-grandparents because those lives belong to their story as well. At the same time, we find ourselves thinking about people who will exist after us. We try to preserve what is good, correct what is not, add something of ourselves, and hand on something worthwhile.

Most of this does not look too heroic while we are doing it. Family life usually looks like dishes and laundry, practices and appointments, difficult conversations, and the daily struggle of getting everyone where they need to be. Yet perhaps this is precisely where the "we" is formed and enriched. The bonds of family are sustained through countless amount of ordinary acts in which we repeatedly choose to treat another person's good as something that matters to us.

This is why the Christian understanding of marriage as a covenant is so much richer than understanding it merely as a partnership between two individuals. Covenant does not destroy individuality, but it does place limits upon individualism. I have freely given myself and received another in return. There are therefore things I owe not because I am being forced to give them, nor because I expect an equivalent return, but because love has created a relationship in which another person's good makes a legitimate claim upon me.

The "I" remains. Marriage and family should never erase the person. But the person discovers that the boundaries of the self are quite capable of expanding. There are people whose joys I now call my joys, whose suffering wounds me, whose future concerns me, and for whose good I will surrender things I once thought indispensable.

Indeed, it is love that has made the "I" plural.