The Prosaic Marriage

This past summer I wrote about a quartly, advertisement-free publication called Seeing the Everyday. I explained how I appreciated the emphasis put on ordinary everyday interactions with our children which seem mundane but are in fact beautiful and memorable. And since my discovery of the magazine, I've been a subscriber who reads each and every page within two days of its arrival...and then I keep them to reread when memory strikes of an applicable moment.

Below is an excert from Issue Four of Seeing the Everyday which will be released in February. I believe every word of it!

Religious leaders, philosophers, and marriage researchers...each emphasize the importance of the prosaic but moral moments in our everyday lives. The philosophy of "prosaics," created by contemporary literary critic Gary Saul Morson, "...Questions whether the most important events may not be the most ordinary and everyday ones. Cloaked in their very ordinariness, the prosaic events that truly shape our lives—escape our notice." In other words, the big milestones of life, as important as graduations and job promotions are, may cause us to overlook what Morson calls "the infinitely numerous and apparently inconsequential ordinary ones, which taken together, are far more effective and significant."

The prosaic marriage is one that fits our real, day-to-day lives. It's not one that lives in a fantasy world where we must always be enchanted newlyweds rather than old friends, where Eden-like homes never need to be cleaned. The prosaic marriage is centered in the home and its normal, everyday routines. Hollywood may not find it alluring. But...marriages are filled with ordinary moments of grocery shopping, breakfast conversations, and bear hugs that sustain husbands and wives through the heavy burdens of child rearing, earning a liviing, illness, and life itself. Ironically, it is in the prosaic moment that marriage finds its ultimate meaning and thus becomes the "big deal" universally yearned for.

Visit seeingtheeveryday.com to learn now to subscribe to this wonderfully thoughtful publication.