Sending a message through matrimony

Alex Coolman

COSTA MESA -- Douglas Bader and Elizabeth Edwards aren’t sure which is

going to be more difficult: saving the Earth or getting married.

They’re trying to do both, but their top priority right now is

marriage. Today, the activists -- they are the people behind AnyBody’s

Earth Press and the Just One More HUG Foundation in Costa Mesa -- will

tie the knot at a ceremony in Silverado Canyon in the Cleveland National

Forest.

Along the way, they said, they’re trying to turn their wedding into a

sort of textbook for other couples who hope to make sure their marriage

doesn’t become another casualty in a culture of divorce.

“Is it a valid thing to attempt, given that the majority of couples

can’t even do it?” Bader asked on a recent afternoon.

He was sitting along with Edwards in the small 17th Street office of

Marilyn Rothman, a woman who calls herself a “life coach.”

Rothman is one of several counselors that Bader and Edwards have been

seeing since they decided to get married -- part of a grand-scale effort

to become as informed as possible about the potential pitfalls of

marriage.

In a satchel that Bader had brought along to the session with Rothman

was a weighty pile of books with titles such as “How to Stay Lovers for

Life,” “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families,” “After the Honeymoon”

and “Beyond the Marriage Fantasy.”

All the research is an effort, the couple said, to determine the deep

issues in marriage -- what it means as a societal custom, why it can be

fulfilling, and why it can be difficult to sustain. The idea is that

their study of the subject can be a foundation for other healthy

marriages.

But if there was anything the recent counseling session proved

clearly, it was that the intellectual approach to marriage only goes so

far.

Fidgeting on a couch, their hands linked, the couple sounded less like

a pair of family theorists than two nervous people attempting to grapple

with some of their deepest anxieties about commitment, couplehood and

family.

Edwards, who is 20, admitted her worries about her father’s attitude

toward her marrying a man twice her age. She said she doesn’t think her

family understands the spiritual and emotional growth she has

experienced, that they don’t fundamentally respect her decision.

Rothman, sitting in a leather chair, suggested that she think about

the issue in a different way. Perhaps her father’s attitudes had to do

with his own fears about loss, his own vulnerability as an aging man.

“I know that intellectually,” Edwards said. “But emotionally it’s very

hard not to have the approval of your father.”

These core concerns -- the fears and weaknesses that motivate every

person -- are even at play in Bader’s environmental work, he said.

“When you analyze what my motivation is, it’s to get to the people who

are most emotionally important to me, but spiritually completely foreign

to me.”

The hope, he said, is that by articulating what usually goes unsaid,

the couple can enter the marriage with some degree of honesty.

Whether that will make for happiness is, of course, the book that

Bader and Edwards will have to write for themselves.