Episode 5 (Mini-Bonus): For Julie & Tyler

In this special mini-bonus episode (under 10 minutes), Nicole recalls a wedding to visit Julie & Tyler, a couple very close to their hearts. Julie & Tyler asked Ryan to riff on love and marriage and life during the ceremony, and Ryan presents those poignant remarks here for the first time publicly. Special thanks to Julie & Tyler for permission to share them and their gift.

Discussed: unresolvable issues in relationships, vulnerability, relationships, compassion, authenticity, empathy, deepening relational dialogue, wisdom, life and marriage, Wendell Berry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Handel's Messiah, individuality and coupling, sameness and difference, distance and closeness, and more.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is Ryan Thomas Neace.

(00:03):
And this is Nicole Neace.
This is the Closer Podcast.
Recently Ryan and I had the opportunity to fly to Chicago and attend a wedding of a dear
friend.
We have known Julie for what feels like forever.

(00:25):
And we have had the chance to get to see her grow into a beautiful woman.
Julie came into our lives at a very crucial time.
And when people ask about how we first met her, as someone who helped care for our children,
that never seems quite fair, or like it doesn't seem like it gives it an adequate reflection

(00:49):
of who she is in our lives.
She has become family, someone that we love getting to spend time with and have been blessed
to see her grow and really just be in relationship with.
So when we first learned of her now husband Tyler, we knew this man, he wasn't like the

(01:13):
other ones.
He cared for her deeply and fiercely and their connection was definitely unique.
So when they got engaged, we were ecstatic, we were over the moon, we couldn't wait to
see them tie the knot.
But what came as a surprise as a blessing and a deep honor was when they asked if Ryan

(01:33):
might speak during the ceremony, that he might say something about love and partnership really,
they didn't give him too many guidelines, just that it would be under 10 minutes.
But what people may or may not know about Ryan is that he is a gifted writer and speaker,
and that he has so much to offer and way of understanding this life.

(01:56):
And what I've always found really fascinating and intriguing about him is his ability to
use words, his crafting of the English language, and the ways in which he can conceptualize
something is or has always been something to behold.
When I first started dating him, I would read things that he wrote or listen to him give
talks or just in simple conversation with our friends and talk about things that all

(02:22):
of us think about.
Some of us try to explain, but somehow seem to not be able to capture and he has just
always had this way about him that makes things make sense.
Anyhow, getting to have the chance to combine this gifting with the expression of love and

(02:42):
hope over two people that we care very deeply about was really, really something to be a
part of.
So in this mini bonus episode, we're going to give you a little peek into what he wrote
and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

(03:04):
For Julian Tyler.
Kentucky farmer and poet laureate Wendell Berry once wrote.
It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and
to deflect our intended course.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when

(03:26):
we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
There is a certain and rampant misnomer about love and marriage that suggests that our intimacy
in those contexts negates our differences or if not negates them, resolves and counter

(03:52):
balances them into a sort of continuous harmony wherein our needs are more or less completely
met by one another.
Sort of yin and yang like two sides of a locket that children give each other in junior high
school which connect to form a heart which reads best friends forever.
I say that this is a misnomer not because it is not sometimes true or not because it

(04:15):
does not contain some truth.
From a 50,000 foot view, surely there are needs and differences my wife and I have that
seemingly through the dumb luck of having chosen one another really are a kind of perfect
match and complementary and they add ease and simplicity and happiness in our lives.

(04:36):
My historical tendency to be serious and dark and brooding much of the time, for example,
and hers to take things mostly lightly and with a grain of salt.
They work well together the vast majority of the time.
And of course from a closer view at say 10,000 feet, there have been an even greater many
things where our needs and differences have in fact been able to be resolved through a

(05:00):
great deal of talking, therapy, reading, prayer, and good old fashioned hard work.
I would not want to take either of these realities from you and in my observation of your relationship
from afar, you already have them in spades.
So tonight, I wanted instead to draw your attention to something like a thousand foot

(05:21):
view of life and marriage wherein I've begun to wonder whether the definition of love might
not be that which is manifest when no amount of dumb luck, no amount of therapy, no amount
of hard work, and indeed no amount of prayer is sufficient to remedy or resolve our differences.
In George Frederick Handel's orchestral magnum opus Messiah, he invokes the paradoxical scriptural

(05:47):
wisdom that in God, every valley is exalted, the mountains and hills made low, the crooked
paths are made straight, and the rough places made plain.
But in my experience of wedded bliss, those realities are somehow experienced in their
very absence, which is to say that we can only lay claim to them to the degree that

(06:08):
we no longer need things to work so neatly that way.
This means the recognition that my wife is a distinct, separate, completely whole human.
And being whole, she has no corresponding locket piece, no complement and no counterpart,
and I as well, and therefore there is nothing to resolve between us.

(06:30):
We are good, whole, enough, just as we are.
And to love one another is to be with one another completely in this way.
It's what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke meant when he wrote,
The love that consists in this, that two solitudes border and protect and greet one another.

(06:52):
That is to say, at the end of the day, we have to find a way to love one another when
our differences result in incompatible needs, things that the other just cannot resolve
with their presence, things that the other cannot mitigate or do much of anything with
at all, because that's just who they are.

(07:12):
That's how this looks practically.
In other words, maybe among the deepest forms of love is that which begins when we find
that we have needs that neither of us can meet for one another, because one another's
needs are not about deficits per se, but about being human.
And therefore meeting or mitigating or resolving all of one another's needs is essentially

(07:33):
code for having no needs at all.
And having no needs is falsehood, because it is inconsistent with being human.
So here today on your wedding day, I would just offer you this.
Perhaps real love is what begins when you find that you can't love one another completely
enough to bring everything between you into resolution.

(07:54):
And perhaps real love is how you learn to carry that reality between you.
On nights where you've fought with one another only to retreat to stalemate, where you've
argued for the millionth time about the same thing, where you've wounded one another yet
again in the same way, where you can mostly feel distance and difficulty between you.
Perhaps then when you feel the most impeded, and perhaps only then, can you hear the song

(08:20):
of love's impeded stream.
And if you attune your ear to it, perhaps it will say this to you.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow we will try again.
Try to be with one another.
To accept one another just as we are.
No resolutions.
And no need for change.
We, each of us, we together, are complete.

(08:44):
This is love.
Light and levity and darkness and heaviness, this is how life is.
And this too is how marriage is.
Savor it.
Drink it all in.
Get every last drop you have coming to you.
All of it belongs.
Here tonight and in perpetuity, peace and blessing and laughter and love, which includes

(09:08):
and subsumes everything under the sun.
I speak these over your marriage, and may it not just be a happy one, but a remarkable,
brilliant human one.
Even as the two of you are remarkable, brilliant people.
I love you both.