The good of marriage

Two months ago, our daughter Theresa married Paul in a downtown church here in Hamilton. Four days later Nancy and I celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary. Then, a week and a half after that, we attended the wedding of Nancy’s niece in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I’ve not written about marriage very often in this space, but I think it’s worth returning on occasion to basics. Marriage is not just another friendly relationship between any two people. It is a foundational institution without which no society can exist. As I am only two generations removed from arranged marriage, I am well aware that past communities were unwilling to leave so important an institution solely in the hands of the prospective partners. If, as the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a supportive community to make a successful marriage.

As Scripture and universal human experience testify, marriage brings together a man and a woman in a covenantal bond that is uniquely reproductive. The marital relationship does not just enhance the spouses but points to the future as it creates and nurtures the coming generation. Even if prospective spouses do choose each other, as Theresa and Paul did, the larger community plays an important role in witnessing and supporting the vows the couple takes. This serves to guarantee stability and continuity across the generations.

After the honeymoon

Recent decades have seen an emphasis on sentiment as a foundation for marriage. Popular songs are disproportionately focussed on romantic love rather than, say, cooking, cleaning, home repair or laundry. Our culture tends to look on love as an emotion exciting the senses. There is indeed something exhilarating about the initial feeling of falling in love. It’s overwhelming and disorienting. It’s something to sing about, inspiring centuries of poetry and music.

Yet in the real world a successful marriage takes hard work. Once the emotion passes, we are left with the ordinary responsibilities of living together and, if God blesses us, raising the children that are a natural consequence of marriage. I have sometimes wondered whether our musicians and poets should be writing love songs devoted to, well, cooking, cleaning, home repair and laundry. It might change the way we nurture our young people towards marriage, and it would keep us from attaching unrealistic expectations to it.

Theresa and Paul chose Mark 10:6-9 as the scripture text for their wedding homily:

“But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
May God bless Theresa and Paul’s marriage and grant them many years together.