Love, Marriage, and Priscilla Presley
When I was a girl, I wanted to travel to exotic places and dreamed of a life free from conventional responsibilities. While other girls fantasized about meeting the one and planning their wedding day, I was living by my whims and planning my next adventure. The thought of being tied down in a marriage felt stifling. All I saw were women comprising their time and teenage girlfriends controlled by their boyfriends. The last thing I wanted was to be with a man who would tell me how I was going to live my life and who I was going to talk to. Although I eventually fell into monogamous live-in relationships in my early twenties, I was quite content to be single in my teens, the later part of my twenties, and into my early thirties. Then I met someone who wanted to get married.
Marriage is a complex system of feelings, emotions, perspectives, needs, wants, and desires between two individuals. Bring children into the mix and the complexity increases. The key word here is “individuals”. Two separate individuals coming together in a union of love and commitment.
We have all heard a multitude of times from relatives, therapists, and self-help books that marriage is work. It is not for the faint of heart and it is a decision we all make daily. Yes, we decide to remain in a marriage and do the work daily. Some marriages might be a given and the thought of a conscious daily decision to remain may not cross everyone’s mind, but we all change and evolve within a marriage and that means we might find ourselves out of alignment with our partners. Sometimes that misalignment becomes so great, we have no choice but to exit. There are challenges along the way. There are hardships, grief, differing plans and goals, family and societal expectations and pressures, and changing desires.
Marriage isn’t a perpetual honeymoon stage, but it can be fulfilling and beneficial for both partners, and our communities at large. A great deal of personal growth happens within a marriage. We are each other’s mirrors. We reflect the good and the evil. With growth comes resilience, strength, and personal empowerment if a marriage is supportive both emotionally and spiritually. The health of our marriages and relationships extend into the life of our children, our communities, and our nation states. If we can remain in a marriage and allow each other to grow and evolve, we can model this same patience and grace in our society.
One of the challenges that we face in marriage is the different perspectives we have as men and women. Our needs, desires, expectations, and feelings vary and often do not coincide. This can lead to misunderstandings, conflict, and sometimes two individuals who find themselves operating on different frequencies. By default, we set ourselves up for failure in marriage just by being the opposite sex in a society that continues to operate in the binary universe of gender roles yet with new expectations and modern role reversals that create more confusion. We want to believe that men and women have changed dramatically, but we haven’t really. Women are just doing more, and men are wondering what they should do. Young girls still fantasize about the perfect marriage. Men still fantasize about the perfect woman. Therein lies the problem. Nothing is perfect. Everything in this life is a work in progress, a perpetual evolution. Women need to come to terms with the reality of marriage and men need to understand that women are perfectly imperfect just as they are. Find a partner who embraces the evolution of your marriage.
Speaking of marriage, I have spent the last few months working on a project that involves researching the life of Elvis Presley. Part of my exploration is listening to Priscilla Presley discuss her marriage to Elvis and their life together. Despite being famous and in the public eye, Priscilla and Elvis were two individuals living within a marriage. It might have looked different from other marriages due to Elvis’ status, career, and lifestyle, but it wasn’t as unusual as some might think. Priscilla is often demonized by some of Elvis’ fans for various reasons, namely that she left him in the early 70s and, according to some fans, lived off his legacy for far too long. Let me set the record straight. Elvis loved Priscilla. He made a conscious decision to marry her, whether he was ready or not. If he didn’t want to marry her, he wouldn’t have. According to Priscilla’s father, there was absolutely no pressure on his end for Elvis to marry his daughter.
Priscilla represented the perfect woman. The ultimate male fantasy — quiet, demure, malleable, devoted. But this wasn’t Priscilla. It was simply an illusion created by a shy, insecure teenage girl. By 1967, when they married, I think Elvis understood that Priscilla was far more. He could pretend a little longer, but eventually Priscilla would wake him from his dream and when she did, he loved her even more.
Priscilla Presley was a young teenage girl when she met Elvis. She barely had a chance to form her identity and figure out what she wanted before entering a relationship with the biggest star in the world, a young man who was also experiencing an identity crisis as a secluded army man thrown from the vortex of superstardom only to emerge again as a highly bankable Hollywood actor. Their marriage would be challenged and despite naysayers, Priscilla did the work and Elvis was committed, but temptations when he was away were unrelenting and Priscilla needed a life of her own. They separated and divorced because that was the only way that Priscilla could grow. Her marriage was on Elvis’ terms. It was stifling. I think they both felt this. Priscilla in her marriage and Elvis in his career. Two birds in adjacent cages.
Elvis took his marriage and family life seriously. He also separated it from his wandering eye. Being faithful sexually and romantically just wasn’t in his vocabulary. He had been sought after by thousands of women and girls before his brain was fully developed. He was also a man coming of age in a different time. Elvis wasn’t bored in his marriage, he was distracted by the demands of his career, his creative frustrations, and his addictions. When Priscilla left Elvis, he crashed. Linda Thompson provided temporary relief. It was another relationship bonded by love and commitment, but Linda was also a young woman who needed to figure out who she was. The missing piece was that Elvis needed to figure out who he was. In the end, he begged Priscilla to return to their marriage. He understood that marriage was more than having a partner who would be there for you, an individual you could create a home with; it was a conscious decision to remain daily and do the work. Unfortunately for Elvis, it was too late. And Priscilla? She made a decision to remain daily through all of Elvis’ ups and downs despite living separately, and has spent the last 47 years, following Elvis’ death, doing the work.
As a side note, the one thing to understand about Elvis is that his mother Gladys was a strong-willed, opinionated, and assertive woman who carried her entire family. The way she is depicted in film and television does not do her justice. In fact, she is depicted as a sad, one-dimensional individual, far from the reality of who she was.
The women in Elvis’ family were strong and independent. His great-grandmother, Rosie, raised multiple children on her own on a sharecropping farm where she worked. Her children were all given her maiden name, Presley. Perhaps the male fantasy is a separation from the boyhood mother/son bond and the female fantasy is the seeking of a knight in shiny armor to replace her father’s protection. Let’s save that for another time.
S. Angell is a published poet, writer, philosopher, and video blogger. She explores various topics, including love, life, death, history, and society from a philosophical perspective. You can find her on Instagram @rainydaypoetess
