The Freedom That Comes From Losing It
A rabbi said something the other day that stopped me cold.
He claimed that marriage makes you more free.
At first I smiled, the way you smile when someone claims the grass is blue, just like in that small fable about the donkey and the tiger.
But then the line stayed with me.
Like a pebble in the shoe that will not shake loose.
I thought about my own life.
About the years before I was married, drifting through countries and jobs, from living on a kibbutz to going wherever the wind pushed me. I had all the freedom in the world. Too much, maybe. Enough freedom to dissolve in it.
And then the years after.
Suddenly my choices mattered. Suddenly there were consequences. Suddenly life had edges.
That shift did not happen because I became wise overnight.
It happened because I lost my freedom.
The rabbi’s point was simple.
When you step into an unfree environment, you are forced to look for freedom in a deeper place.
This is not the freedom of laziness or avoidance.
This is the freedom of direction and the freedom of purpose.
At over forty I went back to study social work, public governance and philosophy. Responsibility pushed me there.
Marriage does that.
It presses you.
It takes the air out of your lungs and demands that you build new ones.
It turns a man into a pressure cooker: sealed, hot, noisy on the inside.
And under that pressure something forms, sometimes character, sometimes escape routes, sometimes both.
But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized something else.
You do not need marriage for this.
You only need structure, something that limits you enough to force you to look for the right kind of freedom.
Marriage is just the traditional version of this.
Give up part of your freedom so you are forced to grow into the freedom that matters.
But the real question is bigger.
In an age of infinite options, permanent adolescence, and people living like they have no one depending on them,
How do you build that same pressure when there is no family to anchor you?
How do you form character in a world that fears discomfort?
Because drifting does not come from being single.
It comes from having no anchor.
No duty.
No one to disappoint.
No stakes.
That is the secret no one wants to admit.
Most people do not suffer from too little freedom.
They suffer from too much.
Too much open sky.
Too many exits.
Too many ways to avoid becoming someone.
So maybe the rabbi was right, but for a different reason.
Marriage is not magic.
It is a boundary that generates pressure.
And pressure is what forces a man inward and upward and forward.
The real task, married or not, is to build a life where something is demanded of you.
A mission. A craft. A child. A standard you hold yourself to.
Something that narrows your choices enough that you stop floating and start walking.
Freedom does not grow in open space.
It grows in confinement.
And the irony is almost comical.
Sometimes the only way to become free
is to tie yourself down to something worth carrying.