A Walk to Remember: or, When Is a Marriage a Marriage?

I finished watching Doctor Who on BBC iPlayer two days ago. So, when I needed something else to do to waste my time, I found myself fumbling through You Tube for old movies. That's how I ran into A Walk to Remember.

Just in case you missed the 2002 teenage romance, allow me to fill you in. Landon, a popular, somewhat troubled high school boy gets stuck doing community service for his school. In the process, he finds himself spending more and more time with Jamie, the socially outcast, devoutly Christian, minister's daughter. He is initially embarrassed to be seen with her, but slowly learns to admire her quiet faith and conviction to do good. Ultimately, he finds himself in love with her and the life-affirming presence that she represents. She surprises herself by loving him back.

As the story moves towards its climax, it is obvious that something is terribly wrong. "I'm sick," she confesses to him, "I have leukemia." Although he is first devastated and resentful, he resolves himself to helping her through the terrifying experience of death by disease.

What makes the picture particularly beautiful is the way in which he helps her. Earlier in the film, she admits to him that she keeps a "to do list" of all the things she wants to accomplish before she dies. With an unexpected sense of urgency, he helps her with as many of them as he can as her health slowly deteriorates. He takes her to the state line so she can be in two places at once. Her helps her apply a temporary tattoo. He even builds her a telescope so she can observe a comet.

But the most beautiful moment in the film is the moment he asks her to help him meet the goal highest on her list: she wants to get married in her mother's church. She agrees. They marry. And she dies at the end of the summer.

After I finished hysterically crying, the film forced me to think about some of my own less-than-orthodox questions about marriage.

Landon and Jamie truly love each other. Each values the other over his or her own happiness. Their love makes them better, and makes the people around them better, too. They are a part of one another, long before he asks her to marry him. Why aren't they married already? What has the ceremony changed?

As a medievalist, the answer is not as straightforward as you might think. Historically speaking, marriage just requires the consent of two adults in front of witnesses. There are medieval anecdotes of parents who catch their daughters in bed with men. They tell her parents they plan to marry. The parents go back downstairs, considering the marriages valid and binding--which, for all intents and purposes, they were. Even now, the Church recognizes that the priest doesn't administer the sacrament of marriage at all--the couple administers it on themselves. The Church doesn't make two people one: two people decide to become one. All silly anecdotes aside, mutual love and commitment make a marriage, not a priest.

Given that fact, it's difficult to determine what makes the significant difference in what a marriage is if it performed in a church in front of a priest. Landon and Jamie gives themselves to one another a long time before their wedding takes place. And Adam and I decided to become one, to give our lives to each other, a long time ago. I feel irrevocably bound to Adam already. It's virtually impossible to believe either of us could walk away at this point without leaving a piece of ourselves behind.

Obviously there are problems with marriage purely by intention, else the Church wouldn't have bothered to clarify. Marriages require the formal sanction of the Church for our own sakes, to protect the sacramental and legal validity of our marriage. How else can they assure that neither partner is being coerced or misled. Plus, marriage is more than just the formal commitment in ways that Jamie and Landon, and Adam and I, haven't satisfied. I plan to follow the traditions of the Church and to continue talking about and treating Adam as my fiancé, rather than as my husband. Still, the three months that stretch before us seem like an endless formality given what we already spiritually share.

I posted a few weeks ago about what engagement is. I suppose that deserves a clarification. Adam takes the idea of engagement more seriously than I do, but that doesn't mean I'm any less committed to him than he is to me. We are, as I believe many couples are, more than engaged. We've already given our lives to each other. We're just waiting to close the deal.

Please do comment if you have any insight! I know I'm not being particularly orthodox. I'd love to better understand what marriage means.