To have and to hold?

There has always been something about the traditional marriage vows that hasn’t sat well with me and over these past few months it has become clearer what that is. It’s the idea that the other person is mine ‘to have and to hold’. Regardless of what this phrase is intended to mean, to me it smacks of possession and ownership.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that no person in any context is mine but they are a gift that I hold with open hands. They are their own, and perhaps God’s, but certainly don’t belong to me in the sense that I own them.

Ownership implies control. Out of an attitude of ownership may easily develop jealousy. And for some reason, jealousy over the one we love in our society is perceived positively. I read somewhere recently that when you have an anger problem you go on an anger management course. The article similarly suggested that if you have a jealousy problem, rather than thinking that you have a right to be jealous, perhaps you need a jealousy management course to start dealing with it.

We believe ourselves to have a right to another person; a right to be jealous over them; a right to influence them or control them in a particular way. What if we received our husband or wife, or any person in our lives, as someone we had no rights over? Instead, we would stand with gratitude at the gift of who they are without demanding or wanting anything more or less from then.

It’s a new way of thinking for me and one that makes far more sense to me in the context of love. We talk of loving someone to death, and so often our love is deathly in its possessiveness and demand. What if love is a letting go, rather than a holding on; a giving rather than a having? Perhaps then the marriage vows, instead of including the phrase ‘to have and to hold’ would include the phrase ‘to give and let go’.