Censorship by Candlelight

You remember those cheesy re-enactments your priesthood/young women’s leaders made you do as teenagers? (ok, so some think they’re cheesy, others get a buzz out of them, and others just want to prove to the ladies that they’re “pioneer material” *manly grunt*)? These events are rituals intended to reinforce our identity as a people...our indulgence in the sociocultural phenomenon the Maurice Halbwachs called “collective memory.” “Collective memory” is seen by scholars as something to be analyzed, pieced together, ripped apart, and even enjoyed. One thing you don’t do...above all else...is take it personally.

Yet as I was listening that brilliant musical by Stephen Sondheim, Company, I heard an interesting tune about a man who was ruminating on what married life was like. The song bespoke a confusion: “Sorry, grateful/ Regretful, happy.” Everything and nothing in his life is because of her. Why, he says, look for answers about what marriage does when none seem to materialize? He always wonders “what might have been” if he had not met his wife. Essentially, the singer tells us, he and his wife had no established narrative of how they got together. Sure, he could tell us the precise events...but there was no sense of inevitability. No sense of “one and only-ness.” It’s a common aphroism in LDS (and really, general lore) that you know you should marry someone not when you can imagine living with that person but when you can’t imagine living without them. Not exactly President Kimball’s “any two righteous people can marry if they’re willing to pay the price” line...

Therefore, my statement is less about the actuality of “one and only”-ness and more about how the Holy Ghost conveys revelation. I have come to truly believe that since the gospel will never be truly demonstrated through empirical methods, we have to access the knowledge through other means. Yet we are talking about historical claims here...events that happened at a place and time. We can’t exactly “faith” our way through these things...at least using the pop culture’s definition of faith. There must be another way of establishing knowledge about divine truths...not the least of which is eternal marriage.

Full disclosure: this argument is blatantly teleological. It’s an argument based on what is and not on what might have been. For a historian, being so focused on the present might get one accused of “presentism,” one of the nastiest insults a historian can level at you. The founding premise of history is that we might understand why things happened the way they happen; this often requires that we understand what did not happen.

But there’s a reason that historians aren’t marriage/family therapists. Imagine me telling my wife: “I could have married so-and-so, but because of timing issues, global warming, the economy, and the shift in cultural norms because of event X, I’m with you instead.” Ah, I can feel the glow of the candlelight dinner. So I suggest to you that healthy marriages are fundamentally a-historical. It creates a contrived history out of a chaos of knowledge. After all, from a strictly historical stand-point, a couple has no business saying that they were “meant to be together” out of the thousands of individuals they would probably never meet. A good marriage requires the massaging of one’s history towards the current relationship, self-censorship if you will. You don’t talk about the ex, certainly not with any adoration. If one does indulge in memories, those memories are funneled into the present circumstances, even if by all other accounts they should not be. Those that cannot fit into the present are sloughed off as irrelevant or becomes points of contention.

So I say unto my married friends...revel in censorship. It might make your candlelight dinners a little more pleasant.