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Some say the expectations are the problem. If people just lived together in peace and harmony without all the legal obligations and wedding rings and assumptions that come from having a public ceremony in front of your friends and family with cake and an eighties cover band, then there would be a lot less heartache if things don’t work out. But sharing your life with someone—whatever that looks like—always involves challenges, and if you part ways, that kind of pain is always heartbreaking.
But whether there’s a ceremony or a ring or a legal document or not, whether it’s biology or cultural conditioning or simply pressure from the relatives, there is an enduring human longing to share our life with someone.
For us, it started in a pickup truck.
It was an early eighties Mazda pickup with a cab on the back and black stripes down the side.
R: I bought it from my neighbor, Dr. Dull.
K: It had a cassette player bolted under the dashboard with the smallest speakers you’ve ever seen.
R: That’s what you remember about that truck—its tiny speakers?
K: What I remember most are the butterflies I had in my stomach the first time I got into that truck. I was living in Arizona at the time and Rob was living in Los Angeles, and when I was accepted into a master’s program at USC, I called him and asked if he would help me find a place to live.
R: Which sounded a little suspicious to me because it was January and her program didn’t start until June.
K: I could say I was just planning ahead—but the truth is, I wanted to know whether this was something more than a friendship.
R: So as I pulled up to “Arrivals” at the airport, I had the strong sense that there was something else going on here. I thought it was better just to get it out in the open, and so when she got in the truck I asked her, “What percentage of your visit is actually to look for a place to live?” She smiled and said, “Well, it makes a great excuse.” I will never forget the BOOM!!! that went off in my heart when she said that.
K: Maybe we should back up for a moment. I grew up in Arizona, Rob grew up in Michigan, and we met on a tennis court our freshman year (#litres_trial_promo) at Wheaton College.
R: To be honest, I knew who she was before we met on that tennis court. During freshmen orientation they gave us a book called Who’s New, which was filled with pictures of incoming freshmen. My friends and I spent hours poring over that book. One of those first days of college, sitting in my room in Traber dorm, I came across Kristen’s picture. Wow, I thought. I should meet her, so that we could, um, study together.
K: I don’t remember Rob studying much, but I do remember once during that freshman year having a conversation with him about cactus. He was fascinated with cactus and couldn’t imagine that I came from a place where we had a large cactus in our yard.
R: Fascinated with cactus? (Cacti?) Really? That may be the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard for chatting up a girl. I suddenly developed an interest in cactus? Did I know how pathetic that must have sounded at the time?
K: Apparently it worked because that summer I sent him a letter (remember those?) with a photo of me standing next to a very large cactus.
R: I remember that photo. And I remember those letters. Our friendship was like that for four years—inside jokes, letters back and forth, having a meal together every now and then, going out as a group with my friends and her friends.
K: I’d go watch Rob’s band (#litres_trial_promo) perform. He had written one song in particular that moved me. The fact that he’d written those lyrics made me wonder what else was in there.
All of which brings us to graduation.
K: I was headed home to work in Arizona.
R: And I was moving to California, which meant driving through Arizona. In one of the first conversations Kristen and I ever had, we talked about waterskiing, and she said that her family had a MasterCraft, which to me was about the greatest boat a person could own (#litres_trial_promo), so I said, “Well, I ought to stop by sometime and we could go waterskiing.”
K: Which I thought would never actually happen. But then at graduation he reminded me of that conversation four years earlier, and he said, “Can I stop by at the end of the summer so we can go waterskiing?” A few months later he showed up at my parents’ house and stayed for several days. When he left, I hoped I would see him again. But I had no idea how that would work.
R: And so I continued on to L.A.
K: And I continued on with my life.
R: And I moved in with my eighty-two-year-old grandmother to take care of her while I went to seminary.
K: And then I got the early acceptance letter from USC, and I called him to tell him I’d be moving to L.A.—and the next thing I knew I was getting in that truck and saying, “It makes a great excuse.”
R: Which was a great line, by the way. Classic.
K: Thank you. But I think there’s an important point to make to here. I knew what I was getting into, and I’m not just talking about the truck. (#litres_trial_promo) I already knew his friends, his family; I’d seen him in all kinds of different situations—there weren’t any surprises. I was ready to see whether this was headed somewhere.
R: Which it was. Specifically, to my grandma’s apartment. (#litres_trial_promo) How killer is that? Me and this hot woman from the desert and my grandma, chillin’ on the green polyester couch with the paisley stitching.
You can be friends with someone, sometimes even for years, with a tremendous amount of respect and friendship and history between you, but when that spark ignites, everything changes.
Several months later we were living in the same city, shortly after that we were engaged, nine months later we were married, and twenty years later we’re still exploring the endless depths of whatever it is that began when Kristen got in that truck and we drove off together.
You find each other, your centers of gravity expand as your lives become more and more entwined. You create space for this other person to thrive
while they’re doing the same for you.
This creates a flow of energy in the space between you.
This energy field is at the heart of marriage. It flows in the space between you, space that exists nowhere else in the universe.
You can become more familiar with how this energy field works.
You can develop language between you to identify what’s happening in the space between you.
You can sharpen your abilities to assess it.
You can act in certain ways to increase the flow.
You can identify what’s blocking the flow, and then you can overcome those barriers.
Years into your marriage, you can continue to intensify this energetic flow between you.
It is risky to give yourself to another. There are no guarantees, and there are lots of ways for it to fall apart and break your heart. But the upside is infinite. (#litres_trial_promo)
There is a mysterious, indescribable, complex exchange that can happen in the space between you, filling you with joy, confirming your intuition that marriage is not only good for you, but good for the world. Marriage has the uniquely powerful capacity to transform you both into more loving and generous and courageous and compassionate people. Marriage—gay and straight—is a gift to the world because the world needs more—not less—love, fidelity, commitment, devotion, and sacrifice.
We’re for marriage, and we want to give you a new way of understanding marriage.
We call this way the zimzum of love.
Which of course raises the question:
What’s a zimzum?
K: Rob loves words. I realize that may sound strange, but he loves finding new words and odd phrases and then using them around the house, repeating them and thinking they’re hilarious. And the more random the better (#litres_trial_promo), like catty wompus or rusty Kleenex.
R: Or Engelbert Humperdinck—
K: —as I was saying …
R: Or unpidgeonholeable—
K: Yes?
R: —or fog index or history of fishes …
K:In the last page of endnotes in his book What We Talk About When We Talk About God Rob gives a list of words (#litres_trial_promo) and phrases and names for apparently no reason other than sheer enjoyment.
R: Like the word cummerbund.
K: Cummerbund?
R: The thing some men for unknown reasons choose to wear around their midsections at weddings. It’s a Persian word, from the word kamar, which means waist—it’s actually a kamar band.
K: I rest my case. Which is why it didn’t surprise me when he started using the word zimzum.
R:Zimzum (originally tzimtzum) is a Hebrew word used in the rabbinic tradition to talk about the creation of the world (#litres_trial_promo)—not in a scientific way but more like something somewhere between poetry and metaphysical speculation. Followers of this tradition began with the assumption that before there was anything, there was only God. The divine, they believed, was all that was. For something to exist other than God, then, God had to create space that wasn’t God. A bit esoteric, but stay with me. Their contention was that for something to exist that wasn’t God, God had to contract or withdraw from a certain space so that something else, something other than God, could exist and thrive in that space. And the word they used for this divine contraction is zimzum. God zimzums, so that everything we know to be everything can exist and thrive.
We loved this word zimzum, and we were struck with how well it describes what happens when you’re married. The more we talked about it, the more we found ourselves bending and stretching this word, making it our own.
You meet this person, you fall in love, and you zimzum—creating space for them to thrive while they’re doing the same for you. This zimzuming unleashes energy and creates space that didn’t exist before, generating the flow that is the lifeblood of marriage.
To illustrate how this flow works, we’ll explore four aspects of this space, space that is responsive, dynamic, exclusive, and sacred.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_2c10672b-1c4f-5b4e-b15c-a8a09d8e7548)
RESPONSIVE (#ulink_2c10672b-1c4f-5b4e-b15c-a8a09d8e7548)
The space between you is extremely responsive.
We’ve drawn this image for responsive as a large, bold arrow toward the other person because everything you do and everything you are affects the flow between the two of you. It’s like a finely tuned radar, or the needle on a record player, the slightest notes and sounds amplified along with every bit of dust or the smallest scratch.
People often aren’t aware of just how responsive the space between them is. It matters what you say, it matters what you do, it matters how you think about this other person, it matters how you think about yourself. All of it, good and bad, shapes the flow between you.
To keep this energy field full of life and vitality, you intentionally act for their well-being. This movement is the foundation of your life together. (#litres_trial_promo) It’s what everything rests on. It’s the engine, the catalyst, the energy that keeps the space between you humming. It’s what you return to again and again.
The arrow moves from you to them while another comes back to you. That’s how the flow starts, that’s how it’s sustained, and that’s how you get it going again when it’s blocked. You’re looking out for their best while they’re looking out for yours.
K: I don’t really enjoy talking on the phone. I’ll blame it on being an introvert. (#litres_trial_promo) I much prefer face-to-face conversations. Transitions like ending a phone call are hard for me, and that combined with an overdeveloped sense of empathy can leave me feeling stuck for a painfully long time. Once in a while I’ll have to return a difficult call—something socially awkward or a call in which I have to say no to somebody—and it will haunt me all day. I tell you this because one day Rob brought home a jacket he’d just bought.
R: I remember that jacket. I loved that jacket. The salesman loved that jacket. Other people in the store loved that jacket.
K: And he put it on for me, and I immediately said No way.
R: She did. Not the slightest doubt. She just shut that jacket down.
K: It had a weird curve in the stitching on the back that just wasn’t right. It looked like a woman’s jacket.
R: You’re killing me right now.
K: No, I was saving you.
R: I’ve learned over time to trust her instincts; so I was fine taking it back. Except for one thing: I couldn’t face the salesman. He had been so excited about that jacket. This pains me to admit, but I couldn’t take that jacket back because I couldn’t face that salesman. How pathetic is that? So in the heat of the moment, desperate, I offered Kristen a deal.
K: Actually, I offered the deal: I’ll take back the jacket for you if you’ll do a hundred awkward phone calls for me.
R: I took that deal so fast. I still have something like ninety-six to go.
We realize this story is ridiculous.
K: I would have taken that jacket back for him without THE DEAL.
R: And I’ll make an awkward phone call for her anytime.
But we tell this story because there’s a back and forth, a give and take that happens when you zimzum.
You ask, What do you want? What do you need?
They tell you.
They ask you the same questions.
You answer.
They listen.
You talk about it.
You do things for each other.
You make deals, and then you laugh about how absurd it is to make deals because you would have done it anyway.
The arrows take you toward each other, creating a sense of momentum as the energy circulates in the space between you.
K: I was traveling in Europe a number of years ago and spent a few days with a newly married couple from the States who had moved there to work together. At one point I was having a meal with the wife and asked her what she saw herself doing in five years. I was surprised with her response, because she talked about living on a different continent, pursuing a degree in a field totally unrelated to the work they were currently doing. Because I had interacted with her husband before this and had heard some of his hopes and plans, I had the growing impression that they hadn’t talked about any of this with each other. They seemed to have lost the glue, the spark, the fire that brought them together in the first place, and they were headed in different directions.
To act, you first have to know.
You have to know what it looks like for them to thrive; you have to be aware of their goals and dreams; you have to know what they want and what they need and what makes them feel secure and what makes them happy and fulfilled.
It’s amazing how much can change between you when you ask, What do you need?
R: People used to hold up signs at football games that read “JOHN 3:16”—remember those? (The person holding the sign up was usually sitting next to the dude in the rainbow wig.) Those signs were referring to a verse in the Bible about how God loves the world so much that God sent God’s son. The big word in that verse is, of course, that. Divine love is the kind of love that does something.
K: It’s one thing to be in love; it’s another to act because of love. Love is a noun—a feeling you have—and it’s also a verb, something you do.
The space between you is highly responsive because it’s generative space—whatever you put into it multiplies exponentially.
Have you ever had an argument or a fight or an epic blowup and then later, when the dust settled and you talked about it, you realized that the whole thing started with something small?
