Tensegrity and Mount Doom

Hear me out. Frodo carrying the ring to Mordor is not only symbolic of addiction. What I see is a relationship being tested; meeting the burden and duty of marriage with resounding affirmation. 

There will be times when you are compelled to support your partner when they are suffering under a burden you cannot understand- a burden you cannot lift in any way. All you can do is carry on and ensure you watch over them as they sleep, ensure they have food and water, ease the journey however you can and advocate for them against forces of evil, addiction, and mental distress. If it calls for it, you will carry them in the journey through it. 

Alternatively, you will at times have to accept the role of Frodo. It is no easy task to be vulnerable in this way, to utterly depend on another.

You may have supportive friends who are doing what they can, but when it comes down to it it really is just you two. Friends will be thinking of you, but your partner will be there in the clawing despair. You can be as open and transparent as you like, but hardships like these are isolating and stiff, imposing a tunnel vision that zeroes in and cuts others out. 

Maybe now more than ever, we strive to find someone to be with, in the end of times.   


The first time your relationship calls for a real dedication like this, you may be disheartened to realize that it cannot return to the way it once was. You can never return to the shire. From that point onwards, you know each other and have been bound to each other with a duty that can no longer be taken lightly. You will always be somewhat on guard, but at the same time, it comes with a security that the earlier relationship could never have developed on its own. You don't just know on paper that you can rely on each other, you know it in your body like you know your spine. 

God willing, there will still be the taste of strawberries. There will still be laughter, play, engagement and fascination. These qualities are not what changes after you've carried one another for the first time. What will change is an initially imperceptible sense of inner trust. Where you may have once looked forward, you worry. When you may have at once stood steady, you brace. That grounding sense within you that everything will be ok has not evaporated or wilted, but it has changed. You know now that things may very well not be ok, but *we* will be. You know now that they can't be depended on to perform independently ad infinitem and that you will fall too, that the ground may shift and the wind may push you off course, but you'll both be there to brace the storm. What faith is lost in probabilities and the promises of preparation, an essential trust is gained.  


After the first time our relationship was really tested and called to action, I proposed in our parking lot. In the fires of Mount Doom, having gone through the despair and doubt and conquered the greater stretch of exhaustion, a strange brevity and relief took over. Even if this were the end of things, as it seemed in those hopeless moments, it can only be with you. 

Many people who know us would assume that Kyle and I relate to this strictly from our experience with his prolonged debilitating illness over 2016-2018, but a quieter struggle occurred more recently in the early months and spring of 2021. We were more private about a mental break I suffered at this time, and whether this can be chalked up to our closest friends being further away or the sharper instance of humiliation really misses the point. Having been through a journey like this before, having watched each other perform these duties and knowing now the complexity and instinct associated with our needs and support, we knew how to switch places. For many months, I was struck with symptoms of PTSD I was not familiar with and my executive functioning in my work, in particular, declined to a degree that I was excruciatingly ashamed of. I know now I can never go back to performing the way I once could and I live in genuine fear of a child now. I could never have found acceptance and saved what little self-esteem I had left after this assault on my identity and sense of self-determination had it not been for the safety and consistent care of my husband. 


Marriage is undoubtedly a burden. Your responsibilities to each other and your shared life are not only domestic but profoundly spiritual. You will be there with them through suffering, grief, humiliation, and despair. You will see them through the death of their parents, the frustration of aging, and you'll be with them as they die. Alternatively, you may be there dying, burdened with the impossible task of preparing them for going on alone. This burden though, I'll take it any day over whatever horror these journeys would be like alone. No friend or family could hold a candle to the way my husband looks at me, even when I am helplessly scrambling for footing, as if I'm still as strong a woman as I've ever been- that same man I watched humbly accept defeat to a flight of stairs, surrendered to my arms. 


Like a structure under forces of tensegrity, a marriage is that impossible and inconceivable force that holds this structure up, making it greater than the sum of it's parts and stronger than it could be even at its most empowered alone. Ask anyone in a long term relationship, and they will tell you. We all fall suddenly ill. Life hits us all at critical points and shatters something inside of us. We will all, at some point, be under an outstanding burden, but the feat itself is not what moves the spirit- it is Sam, carrying Frodo. It is Frodo, who carries that burden and trusts, always, that he is safe even in a world so explicitly unforgiving. 

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