My View: Dump the Corpse Marriage

    A friend of mine is in a corpse marriage. You know, a marriage that someone tries to breathe life into periodically, but is well beyond the pale. One that has been lifeless for so long, rigor mortis has started to set in. We have all seen this, and some of us have even been there.   

Corpse marriages can’t grow because they don’t sustain life. Many times, fear of leaving and facing the truth has been somberly masked by the seemingly more noble cause of not wanting to hurt the children. But the debate continues over whether the children are already being wounded by unwittingly donating themselves to be the life blood of something that’s already dead.    

It’s best to bury a dead marriage, in my opinion. Because even if you don’t, there is going to be a funeral anyway. Keeping up the guise of a corpse marriage will require the death sacrifice of at least one of the spouses, if not both. While dead marriages can’t be revived, endangered marriages can survive. So say the experts. But in order to avoid extinction, experts also agree that Herculean changes need to be made, both internally and externally. And intent is integral, namely, that both parties want it to change. But it's tough to fall back in love. Therein lies the rub.     

But as all things do need to change; so, too, do marriages. I would say that better than just reviving an old marriage by rearranging roles, it might be kinder to euthanize it. A broken down, barely breathing marriage sometimes needs to die so that a new one may be born. And for that to happen, everyone has to agree to leave the past firmly behind and move determinedly toward the future, careful to create the marriage that they want and not repeat the old patterns that got them to the funeral home in the first place.    

I am not sure what killed my friend’s marriage. Perhaps neglect. I suspect youth took them happily down the aisle over 25 years ago and left them sometime later, without any tools for the future. There isn’t a lot of healthy communication and the connection, while lost between them, seems to only exist with their kids. It’s sad. For now, my friend continues to maintain the cadaver. It looks pretty good from a distance, but as many of us know, inside the coffin, it’s a different story.   



Lenore Skomal is author of nine books and columnist of an award-winning weekly column in the Erie, Pa., Times-News, she also teaches college journalism in Pennsylvania.