“It’s a private thing, just between two people.”
“A promise, as long as we both shall love.”
“A sacred promise to love, honor, and cherish, through good times and bad, through joy and sorrow.”
Over the last three years, I have heard lots of ideas and beliefs about marriage. And during my twenty-two years of marriage I have formed some ideas of my own.
The last two decades have seen an acceleration of what has been called the “privatization” of marriage – that is, the growing acceptance that marriage is a private relationship between two people.
Judge Helen Brown, a family court judge from Detroit, Michigan, has said that anyone who believes marriage is a private institution has never been to family court. “The state can and will tell you where you and your children will live, how you will spend your money, if you can move, where your child will go to school, when you can see your child, and how you can interact with your soon-to-be former spouse,” she said.
The state clearly has a strong and valid role in the marriage and family business, including protecting the rights of family members.
Ideas and attitudes about marriage, divorce, and childrearing are in a time of enormous transition.
After a long period in which the popular wisdom said that it was almost always better to divorce if you had ongoing conflict in your marriage – especially if you have children – research has found that just the opposite is true. Children and adults alike recover very, very slowly from divorce, and the majority of those involved in divorce do not go on to build happier, healthier lives.
At the same time, many people embraced the idea that living together before marriage was the best way to ensure that you ultimately would have a healthier, happier marriage. Research has found that couples who live together before marriage are significantly more prone far more likely to divorce. Researchers report that when living together, lots of people develop some attitudes and habits that are damaging to their future marriages.
At the same time, many people embraced the idea that living together before marriage was the best way to ensure that you ultimately would have a healthier, happier marriage. Research has found that couples who live together before marriage are significantly more prone to divorce. It seems that while living together, lots of people develop some attitudes and habits that are damaging to their future marriages.
The research is pretty clear about one aspect of marriage: married people live longer, are happier and healthier both physically and mentally, have more fulfilling sex lives, do significantly better economically, and raise the most well-balanced children.
So why isn’t everyone rushing to get married…and why aren’t those who are married but troubled rushing to counseling to save this most precious of institutions?
Goldie Hawn summed it up pretty well in an interview in Redbook magazine. Hawn has lived for more than 17 years with actor Kurt Russell. They are the parents of a teen-aged son and share parenting responsibilities for three other children from their previous relationships. Hawn says she prefers to “wake up each morning and make the choice to be in that relationship and understand that it only has a certain lifespan, whatever that may be.”
Popular culture rarely differentiates marriage and its imitators. The cover of Redbook promised to reveal Goldie’s secrets for maintaining joy in marriage, family, and career.
I have read the research and worked with dozens of families. Keeping your options open and making a daily choice to stick around isn’t what builds a lasting marriage.
Yet that is the clarion call today. We want to keep our options open.
Something, or someone, better might come along. Be flexible. Be open. Go with the flow.
The problem is that this strategy doesn’t work very well in helping us achieve something else the majority of Americans say they want: stable, fulfilling, long-lasting marriages. In fact, those attitudes undermine marriage.
Here is the first truth I’ve learned about marriage. Every day isn’t a honeymoon. Some days (and months) are terrific, and some are less than terrific. But our promise to each other that divorce isn’t part of our vocabulary gives us the freedom, the flexibility, the security, and the time to have bad days and to work things out, without fearing that the end is near.
I have an old family cookbook that tells you how easy – or hard – each recipe is to prepare. One description is “work but worth it.” That describes my second truth about marriage: It is work, but it is definitely worth it.
A major policy paper on marriage released this summer describes six dimensions of marriage – a personal bond, a legal contract, a financial partnership, a family-making bond, a spiritual promise, a sexual union. “In all these ways, marriage is a productive institution, not a consumer good. Marriage does not simply certify existing loving relationships, but rather transforms the ways in which couples act toward one another, toward their children, and toward the future,” the statement says.
“Marriage also changes the way in which other individuals, groups, and institutions think about and act toward the couple. The public, legal side of marriage increases couples’ confidence that their partnerships will last. Conversely, the more marriage is redefined as simply a private relationship, the less effective marriage becomes in helping couples achieve their goal of a lasting bond.”
For me, marriage is first and foremost a personal bond. Bill and I have committed our lives to each other, we have formed a partnership for now and the future.
But our relationship goes beyond the two of us. It affects our children and their security, our extended families, our circle of friends and acquaintances. It impacts our work, our worship, our leisure. If we fail to carry out our promises and commitments to each other, it has an impact on society as a whole, especially if society has to help pick up the pieces of our broken lives through the courts, child support enforcement, and other legal entities.
People have lots of reasons to marry, and not to marry. But when we make that commitment, it is much more than a piece of paper. It is a statement – a sacred promise – about how we will conduct our lives and our most precious relationships.
