What poker can teach us about relationships
At a poker table, no one is dealt in for free. Before a single card comes off the deck, every player pushes a small bet into the center — the ante. It buys nothing but the right to play, paid in the dark, before you know whether the hand will be worth anything. That is the honest way to understand a wedding. The two people at the altar are not betting on the hand they hope to be dealt. They are betting before they have seen a single card.
The words most couples speak were set down in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in 1549: to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part. Those words have been spoken at weddings for nearly five hundred years, and I do not think their endurance is an accident. Read them the way a card player reads them and you notice the remarkable thing about them. They do not list the good outcomes and promise to stay for those. They list the outcomes in pairs — the good one and the bad one, side by side — and promise to stay for both.
I spent a career drafting documents for people, and I can tell you that almost every other commitment in life is written the other way. Contracts carry conditions and escape clauses. Business deals spell out what happens if things go wrong, and the going wrong is usually a way out. A marriage vow is nearly alone in doing the opposite. It names the worst cards in the deck — poverty, sickness, and that unspecified “worse” that covers everything else — and says, in advance, in front of witnesses: those will not move me. The couple is not promising to love the outcome. They are promising to love the person, whatever the outcome turns out to be.
In my years of practice I sat with couples at both ends of this bet. I drafted wills for husbands and wives who had been married fifty and sixty years, and I sat across the desk from people whose marriages were ending — in my office, in hospital corridors, in probate hearings. Here is what struck me, over and over: the couples who lasted were not the ones who had been dealt the kindest cards. Plenty of them had buried children, lost businesses, nursed each other through long illnesses, gone broke and started again. The cards were often terrible. What they had was not luck. It was a decision, made early and renewed constantly, that the cards did not get a vote.
That is also what separates a vow from a feeling. Feelings are dealt to you, like cards — you do not choose them, and they change with the weather of a season. A couple in the hard years of young children, or in the frightening months of a diagnosis, may not feel much of what they felt at the altar. If the marriage rests on the feeling, it is resting on the flop. The vow was designed for exactly those seasons. It is the chip you pushed in before the cards came, precisely so that a bad run of cards could not talk you out of the game.
None of this means the bet is small. It is the largest one most of us will ever make — our freedom, our pride, a great share of our time and our future, placed on one person whose whole life is still face down on the table. The young couple at the altar cannot truly know what they are promising. In a sense, that is the point of promising it in words written five centuries ago by people who did know. They knew life deals sickness and health to the same address, and that “worse” is a scheduled stop on nearly every long journey. They wrote the vow to cover the whole road.
Here is the takeaway. If you are married, find the words you actually said — in a wedding program, a framed print, or your memory of standing there nervous and young — and read them slowly, as a bet rather than a poem. Then ask two questions. What has “worse” looked like in our years so far, and did we stay at the table through it? And what might “worse” still hold that we should talk about now, while the table is calm? The couples I watched win this game were not the lucky ones. They were the ones who understood, from the very first hand, what they had bet — and never once asked to take it back.
