Among the ancient Greeks the Spartans fielded the most feared and skillful hoplites, or infantrymen. They were famous for their ascetic lifestyles, training in martial arts from the age of seven. Spartans disdained luxuries of every sort in order to harden themselves for battle and keep their egos in check. (A visiting traveler once quipped dryly after eating their food: “Now I see why they’re not afraid to die.”) When Spartans marched out on campaign, mothers would hand their sons the shields they would carry into battle and say to them, “Either with this or on it” (e tan e epi tan). What they meant was there were only two honorable ways a battle could end for a Spartan soldier; he could win the day alongside his comrades, or he could die trying. Either outcome was cause for celebration. But if a Spartan soldier came home without his shield, it meant he had fled the field of battle and abandoned his comrades to their fate, an act of cowardice punishable by ostracization.
Athenians, who counted themselves far more cultured and cosmopolitan than their northern neighbors, ridiculed the Spartan definition of honor as pointlessly, wastefully rigid. Athenian generals were perfectly willing to retreat or surrender if they thought that continuing to fight would only result in the loss of lives and resources. Fighting to the death made zero sense to them: if victory didn’t look probable, why decimate your forces? Better to live to fight another battle another day. This kind of self-interest seemed not only sensible but patriotic to the Athenians. It also made them better naval fighters, where tactics and swiftness carried the day, than infantrymen, where their tenacity and discipline made the Spartans all but unbeatable. If you’ve seen the movie 300, it was based on an actual historical battle, Thermopylae, during which a Spartan force of a mere 300 hoplites, led by King Leonidas, resisted a Persian army more than 30 times its size. Though the Spartans ultimately perished, their sacrifice bought time for the Athenians and their allies to retreat and regroup at Salamis, where they ultimately defeated the Persians in a naval battle.
These opposing Spartan and Athenian philosophies of war correlate, in my mind at least, to two opposing philosophies of marriage that Tim Keller has observed (tellingly, I mistyped “martial” as “marital” at least twice while writing the paragraphs above). What I’m calling the Spartan view, he calls the Covenant view of marriage: i.e., “till death do us part.” What I’m calling the Athenian view, he calls the Consumer view: i.e., “till something better comes along.” Keller argues that happy marriages, or at least fair ones, can be contracted between two Spartans or two Athenians—because both partners are on the same page, philosophically and ethically speaking. When trouble arises is when a Spartan marries an Athenian. Then, the Spartan is almost inevitably exploited because they will sacrifice anything to keep the marriage intact; meanwhile, the Athenian hedges their bets and looks to trade up when a better option presents itself—just as the Athenians retreated to Salamis while the Spartans fell under a rain of Persian swords and arrows.
I was the Spartan in our marriage, and my ex was the Athenian. Though we swore exactly the same vows in our marriage, it turned out only one of us really meant the “till death do us part” part. Though the marriage was always volatile, and became increasingly difficult as time wore on, divorce was never an option for me. I tried everything, again and again, to keep loving my husband and honoring my vows. And though I knew he was always looking to optimize every area of his life—including my performance as his wife—I somehow fooled myself into thinking that I was exempt from his relentless drive to trade up. I teased him once, about 10 years into our marriage, that since he had never kept anything–a car, job, a bicycle–for more than 5 years as long as I had known him, I must really be a keeper…. He reacted really badly to this joke, and I was taken aback at the time because it was so clearly a joke, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he as committed to me as I was to him? For me, he passed the test the moment I said “yes” to his proposal—I assumed I had passed, too. Turned out, not only had I not passed the test, I was apparently only on page 18 of it….
I can’t speak for what was going through my ex’s head those 18 years I thought we were building a life together that would last forever. I can only speak to his actions, especially at the end—and those tell me that his love for me was conditional. Because when I no longer met those conditions, he turned tail and ran for Salamis (i.e., another woman) without so much as a glance backward, a single counseling session to try to save a noble and hard-fought 18-year marriage. And there I was left standing in the middle of the battlefield with my shield, corpses all around me and arrows blackening out the sun overhead.
That leaves two questions: with it or on it? Was I holding my shield or lying dead on it? I think the answer is “yes.” But it doesn’t matter because either way, like those Spartan mothers, I counted my marriage a victory. I was faithful to the bitter end. I kept fighting even when it hurt and I was tired. I resisted, with God’s help, the temptation to desert the field. I fought for our love. And to this day, I believe that’s worth fighting for, even dying for.
While ultimately there’s no way to judge between the Spartan and Athenian codes of battle, because all’s fair in war, I don’t think love is war. And I don’t think marriage is a consumer transaction like buying a car. When the marriage doesn’t run as fast or look as shiny anymore, if you resist the urge to trade it in, if you get under the hood and find out what’s wrong, work on it, you not only keep the car running, you learn something about yourself in the process. While that argument would just be common sense to a Spartan, I think I might even be able to convince an Athenian…because every time you trade a car in, you lose money. Every time you cut and run, you lose the warrior you would have become if you stood your ground, slammed the bottom of your shield into the dirt and screamed at the enemy like a Spartan, molon labe: Come and get it. Didn’t Athenians claim to value above all three virtues in their citizens: arete (excellence of character), phronesis (good judgment), and eunoia (good will)? The funny thing about those virtues is you don’t know you have them until they’re tested—until you’re pushed beyond the limits of what feels good, what’s cheap, what’s easy. Living always within those limits is what makes us cowards, parasites feeding off those around us who are willing to pick up the slack we’ve left hanging in the hard work of life and love.
I want to make it clear at this point I’ve been talking about healthy marriages, not abusive ones. Getting out of an abusive marriage doesn’t make you a coward–in fact, quite the opposite. If you have read my other Wednesday’s Child posts, you’ll know my ex was abusive. And while I’m proud of myself that I fought for my marriage, at some point I got confused about what I was fighting for. I didn’t realize until my ex abandoned me and I got a good therapist that my defensive phalanx had drifted and left some key things behind: namely, me, my husband, and our love. What I should have done was slam down my shield the first time he called me a fucking bitch (or, hey, how about the 5th time?). Setting a boundary at that point (i.e., separating until he got into therapy and showed some significant progress in overcoming his childhood trauma and abusive coping mechanisms) wouldn’t just have protected me, it might have actually protected him. It might have kept him from going down a path that would eventually turn him into a coward and a parasite. But even if it didn’t, it would have kept me from becoming one–from cowering in the icy shadows of an abusive marriage because at least it wasn’t the unknown, at least I wouldn’t lose face, endure the public glare of being labeled a “divorcée” (note there’s no equivalent label for a divorced man…).
So ironically, shielding myself and my marriage vows with a strong boundary would have been a more effective way of fighting for them than all the other tactics I tried—appeasing, bargaining, pleading, yelling, manipulating, staying silent—because it would have forced us to work together either to save the marriage or honorably let it go. By refusing to set a boundary against the abuse, I was in fact retreating from my responsibilities to defend myself and to love my husband unconditionally, i.e., even when doing the right thing meant he might not love me anymore.
My marriage is over, and every general knows you can’t fight a battle over again, whether you won or lost. But what I learned from this one is that “with it or on it” is ultimately a challenge I can only give myself, and only when I’m sure I’m fighting for the only thing worth living and dying for.
The Rookery 