Marriage Isn’t for Me, or You

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”- G.K. Chesterton 

What is marriage? Having seen The Princess Bride, my first inclination is to imitate the bishop from the famous marriage scene.

 But the answer, “What brings us together, today,” doesn’t hold much water, philosophically speaking. In their book What is Marriage?, Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson and Robert George offer an argument that marriage is a conjugal bond. Their view is “a vision of marriage as a bodily as well as an emotional and spiritual bond, distinguished thus by its comprehensiveness, which is, like all love, effusive: flowing out into the wide sharing of family life and ahead to lifelong fidelity.”  Of course, their primary purpose for writing is to offer a defense of the conjugal view of marriage in the face of revisionists. For this reason, the book focuses on the philosophical nature of marriage.

But there is another side to the “What is Marriage?” coin. “How ought I to live as a married man or married woman?” “What is marriage for me, right now?” These are questions that have to be answered before a marriage culture can thrive. Having all the best arguments on your side is important, but they won’t substitute for the best people. Saints aren’t remembered for being right, they are remembered (and revered) for being good. Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Encountering a married couple living their vocation does more to spread the truths about marriage than all the books in the world ever could.

In response to the question, “How ought I to live as a married man or married woman?”, I have nothing to offer. I am not married. I am notoriously bad at keeping a relationship and I tend to be rather selfish. However, I have, as though it were an act of divine providence, encountered four people in the past month who do have something to offer. On the blogs and on the street, the question of how to live a marriage is in the air. What follows amounts to an account of my eavesdropping. Though if asked, I would maintain that “I haven’t been droppin’ no eaves, sir, honest.”

Seth Adam Smith has been married for a year and a half. A little over a week ago, he declared on his blog: “I’ve recently come to the conclusion that marriage isn’t for me.” He should have seen this revelation coming. He admits that as his wedding approached, he began to ask questions. “Was I ready? Was I making the right choice? Was Kim the right person to marry? Would she make me happy?” Seth then goes on to make the classic mistake of asking his father for advice. It is uncanny how superficial and silly fathers can be during our high school years. Then, as if a miracle had occurred, they are filled with wisdom and insight almost overnight. It is dangerous to ask them questions, because they just might give the right answer. Seth recounts his father’s words:

 “Seth, you’re being totally selfish. So I’m going to make this really simple: marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.” To all who are reading this article—married, almost married, single, or even the sworn bachelor or bachelorette—I want you to know that marriage isn’t for you. No true relationship of love is for you. Love is about the person you love. And, paradoxically, the more you truly love that person, the more love you receive. And not just from your significant other, but from their friends and their family and thousands of others you never would have met had your love remained self-centered. Truly, love and marriage isn’t for you. It’s for others.

This blog spread like wildfire across my Facebook feed. But like all writing, blogs tend to attract criticism, and it is in the nature of bloggers to disagree with each other. It wasn’t long before a response was being passed around. Jeremy, the author, affirms Seth’s point that marriage isn’t about being selfish, but he doesn’t much care for what Seth’s dad had to say.

Like the author claims, marriage is definitely not about making yourself happy, but it’s not always about making your spouse happy either. True love is focused on God, and that sometimes means making people unhappy in order to draw them closer to God. Marriage is not about making your spouse smile or laugh every day. Marriage is not about being nice, it’s about loving your spouse as God loves them.  Marriage is not only about making your spouse happy, it’s about making them holy.

Now it should be obvious to anybody that Jeremy and Seth are getting at the same point. Jeremy makes the mistake of thinking of ‘happy’ as a superficial feeling. To make your spouse happy is to do what is best for them. What is best for them is to be holy. Thus, bringing your spouse closer to God will make them holy and happy. The two are intertwined.

What is more, there is a theological argument to be made about how marriage and holiness are related, spiritually speaking. Christopher West wrote this on his blog:

Yesterday’s Gospel contains one of the key texts of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body: “Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Lk 20:35).  The Bible begins with the marriage of man and woman and it ends with the Marriage of Christ and the Church.  The whole purpose of the first – indeed, the entire reason God made us male and female and calls the two to become “one flesh” – is to proclaim, reveal, and foreshadow the second (see Eph 5:31-32).  In other words, earthly marriage is a sign of heavenly marriage.  In yesterday’s Gospel, Jesus is saying, “You no longer need a sign to point you to heaven when you are in heaven.”;  And this means, as beautiful and wonderful as marital love and union can be, we mustn’t hang our hats on a hook that cannot bear the weight.  We are created for an infinite union of love, for an eternal Marriage.  Eros, that longing in our hearts that we all feel for love and union, is meant to be the rocket fuel that launches us to the stars: to Infinity and beyond…;

What is marriage? Well, “It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.” “It’s about loving your spouse as God loves them.  Marriage is not only about making your spouse happy, it’s about making them holy.” “Earthly marriage is a sign of heavenly marriage.” I said at the beginning I had nothing to offer as far as the question of marriage is concerned. I still don’t. But the point made by Seth, Jeremy and Christopher was nicely summed up by a diaconate candidate a few weeks ago, here in Moorhead. He told me:

As a boy, I used to go help out on my grandfather’s farm. Now, like most men, I look back at my teenage self and wonder how I ever grew out of that stomach-churning individual. Anyway, one day I got it into my head to ask my grandfather a question. I had always wondered why my Dad was the only child of the family, despite the fact that most farm families were huge and…after all… you’ve got to do something during those long Minnesota winter nights. So I asked him this with a cheeky little grin and I’ll never forget what he said. “It’s true that most farm families are pretty big. Sure I would have liked more kids. But your Dad almost didn’t survive his birth. Neither did his mother. They were both half-dead for days. I asked the doctor to explain to me what was going on and he made it real simple: if your grandmother had another baby, she would die. So, after that, I never touched her again.” My grandpa walked off and spit in grass, leaving me dumbfounded. What I later learned is that my father didn’t even know this. I was the first person my grandfather had told.

It is encouraging that the question “What is Marriage?” is being asked. Here in the Crookston Diocese, Bishop Hoeppner has declared “A Year of Marriage.” It is my hope that these questions will stick around. Marriage may yet be a duel to death, as Chesterton suggested. But if the popularity of Seth’s blog is any indication, the issue is still open in the minds of my peers. Thank God they are asking the right question.