Fight for a Healthy Marriage? Rubbish!

What follows is an edited version of a portion of my book,”O’Shaughnessey: The Faerie Circle,” in which young Margaret McNeill Mahoney talks to the shenache Moira McCarthy about her parents’ troubled marriage which inspires Moira’s unorthodox response.

“I see you’ve found my Liam,” Moira said.
Margaret jumped and almost dropped the picture.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m such a …”
“Oh, it’s all right, girl. I’m glad you found him. That’s the shrine I made to him in the corner between the western and the northern wall.”
“He must have been a good man.”
“I adored him. D’you know, we never had an argument, Liam and I? … Oh, we tried. We said that on St. Valentine’s Day, when all the others were making up for a year of misery, we would take that opportunity to abuse each other. It never worked.” Moira cradled the picture in her hand. “We always ended up laughing, which is the surest cure for a bad temper. No, we never had aught to fight about, so matched a set we were from the very beginning.”
“That is so hard to believe.”
“So much is hard for you to believe, darlin’, but, the secret for finding such a match is in the choosing. I was seventeen when he proposed, a wispy girl with flaxen hair and freckles. He upped and said, ‘Little Moira Donnelly, come your nineteenth birthday I will have you for my wife.’ There he was with his crooked smile, looking for all the world like a broken puppet, but I was his from that day.” She patted Margaret on the shoulder. “And, you say there is no magic in the world.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“Indeed it is. Oh, they say people your age get all caught up in the romance of it all, but I tell you, old as I am I still feel the fever when I think of him. Do your parents fight?”
“Of course. Mom says studies show a couple who don’t fight can’t have a healthy marriage.”
Moira laughed heartily. When she could speak again she was only able to say, “Rubbish.”
“But all the experts say,” Margaret said.
“It’s the most absurd thing…” Moira waved at the hearth. “Take all the words of all the experts in all the world and the truth of them wouldn’t fill that teakettle over there.”
Moira turned away to wash her hands at the stand by the back door. “What your parents find to fight about, anyway?”
“Him,” Margaret said a little too quickly and then caught herself. Family business was family business, Mom said, and it was ill manners to publicize it.
“Him?” Moira said, drying her hands.
Moira took a jug of milk and a box of cheese out of the cold cupboard. “You don’t have to tell me, you know,”
“I know. … He just can’t seem to do anything. He teaches, but he’s not a teacher, he writes books that nobody reads… And, that’s what they fight about.”
“Well, I wish I could help, but…”
“I know. What can you do?” Margaret picked up a piece of bread and slapped a slice of cheese on it.
“Nothing,” Moira said. “It’s not your burden.”
“But, why do they do it? It just seems stupid.”
“Darlin’ girl, people fight because they have not chosen well, and that’s the end of it. Your father is not a whole person, there’s something missing in him, and it’s a mistake to think that anything outside of himself will do it; neither his wife nor his daughter can or should. Let it alone.”
“But, he’s my dad.”
“Let it alone,” … Moira clasped her hands together on the table and said in a voice that was unmistakably genuine, “[Liam] said to me that having decided–decided, mind you–to love me, it followed that there was nothing about me he would refuse to love.”
“Awesome! But, really, is that even possible?”
“I made the same promise to him.” Then she got a mischievous look in her eye and added, “I loved even what I didn’t particularly like.”
Margaret grasped the edge of the table with both hands. “So, you didn’t like everything.”
“Oh, no! But, I decided to love him because of the things I didn’t like, not in spite of them. It’s a different way of thinking, you see.” Moira leaned her chin on her hand and smiled at the girl. “Kind of like seeing faeries requires a different way of thinking. If something he did annoyed me, I didn’t ask why he was doing it; I’d ask why I was being annoyed? Modern people with all their theories are far too … what’s the word?”
“Defensive?”
“Close enough. They’re too afraid that someone’s going to score points on them that they’ve forgotten how to love at all. It’s marriage, not rugby. [Liam] wasn’t a cruel man nor did he wish to change anything about me, and there wasn’t anything for him to win that he could not have gotten by the asking.”
“You never said no?”
“Lots of times. And he would leave it at that.” Moira covered Margaret’s hands with her own and leaned in to her. “Listen, child, we all have the right to ask for anything we need and want, but, and the tricky part is we have to be willing to accept a no with as much grace as we would a yes.”…To do otherwise is thievery. You cannot take anything that is not given; you cannot expect anything that has not been agreed to, for that’s a violation of the other’s personal sovereignty, the right and responsibility to own and rule one’s self. Everyone has that right and that responsibility.” Moira picked up her cup and took a sip. “We understood that we would not refuse each other out of malice or wanting to hurt, and that’s where the trust comes in. Not many there are today who can manage it. And so they fight.” She laughed heartily. “They fight for a healthy marriage!” And she continued to laugh as if it were the most astonishing thing she’d ever heard.