All the statistics and surveys indicate that smaller percentages of young men and women give priority to marriage as their natural vocation. Even in the prime years for matrimony in their twenties and thirties, more and more eligible men and women classify marriage as a secondary consideration rather than a crucial life decision. Explanations and answers vary from the burden of financial debt to commitments to professional advancement and educational pursuits to the convenience of cohabitation to the fear of divorce and alimony. As Pope Francis also recently observed in the general audience of April 29, “It is a fact that persons who marry are always fewer; this is a fact: young people do not want to get married.” This skepticism about the marital vocation and the fear of commitment reflect a rejection of God’s plan and design for the family. It reveals a cynicism about marriage, a lack of faith and a loss of belief in God’s Providence.
While God ordered man and woman for each other (“It is not good for the man to be alone”) and elevated matrimony to a holy sacrament (“What God has joined together, let no man rend asunder”), the sexual revolution has destroyed the attraction of marriage as a human ideal and divine institution. It has lowered the status of marriage from holy matrimony to a mere arrangement; from a noble vocation to an inconsequential role; from a great decision to a mere arbitrary choice and from a gift of God to a perquisite. The rejection of the traditional definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman robs matrimony of its dignity and honor and lowers a divine institution to a mere man-made construction subject to change and reinvention by judges. The trivialization of marriage follows from its reduced status of importance for the happiness of individuals and for the common good of a society.
Instead of courting, falling in love, becoming engaged, and marrying with an openness to life and a commitment of fidelity to one another in an indissoluble relationship, many couples circumvent this natural course of love in favor of “living together” in a cohabiting relationship without vows, commitments, obligations, or public promises before witnesses and God. Instead of consulting their hearts, examining their conscience, discerning the deepest desires of their souls, and exercising the virtue of prudence that offers foresight, many couples prematurely enter into intimate relations as they experiment with marriage without honestly intending to marry or fulfilling the duties of devoted spouses in the course of an entire lifetime. They fail to prepare for the many demands and trials that accompany marriage and parenthood.
However, marriage is not a temporary experiment that involves trial and error, but a lifelong obligation that demands patience, perseverance, constancy, and long-suffering. While cohabitation remains, at best, a superficial relationship based on convenience, pleasure and comfort, it makes no demands of love or the gift of self, and it takes no sacred vows. It simulates love but does not serve the beloved, acting only in the name of self-interest and in the use of another person for momentary satisfaction. Cohabitation provides no foundation for a family, home, or future, always subject to the whims, moods, and desires of either party who can instantly dissolve the relationship for any reason. Those who cohabit rather than marry have no daring, no sense of romance, no faith and no love. The choice is dishonorable and cowardly, insincere and duplicitous.
Instead of marrying and taking a chance with promises that swear for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, and for richer or poorer—an abandonment to God’s Providence—many couples, ruled by caution and timidity, fear risk because they fail to entrust their lives to God’s will, as if God does not provide the graces of matrimony. Their approach to marriage resembles the politic advice that Shakespeare’s fool Polonius gives to his son: watch out, trust no one, be careful, beware: “Give thy thoughts no tongue . . . reserve thy judgment…Neither a borrower nor lender be.” Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the proverb says. Those dominated by an excessive sense of security that requires guarantees and who fear an imprudent choice or a bad marriage have no sense of life as a great adventure, no confidence in the courage of their convictions, and no hope about the future.
Instead of making holy choices based on noble motives, pure intentions and prudent discernment, many young people let economic considerations and statistical data rule their minds and hearts. While statistics reveal that forty to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, those averages do not present the entire truth about marriage. Marriage is not an act of gambling at a casino but a moral choice of the heart, mind, and conscience based on the knowledge of another person one has come to know over a period of time and on a belief in God’s promises. If courtship precedes marriage rather than cohabitation, if honesty prevails in the relationship between man and woman and if true love from a pure, generous heart inspires the romance, then many factors have converged to provide certitude, the knowledge that one is deeply in love, that this person is an answer to a prayer, that a dream has come true, and that this love is meant to be because it comes from God. All great love stories have these unmistakable elements.
Those who reject marriage for all the wrong reasons do not wish to live their lives as a love story, a great romance or a surprising journey. Approaching marriage as if it were a purchase accompanied by a contract of legal agreements, couples do not venture into the deep or glimpse the mystery of love—what poets like John Donne refer to as “lovers’ infiniteness” or “love’s growth.” He compares love’s growth to a series of concentric circles, always centered and unchanging and always increasing and widening: “If, as in water stir’d more circles bee/ Produc’d by one, love such additions take,/ Those like so many spheares, but one heaven make,/ For, they are concentrique unto thee.” Those who fear the possible financial losses incurred by bad marriages that end in divorce fail to consider the multiplication of love’s fruits that abound in the course of a lifetime of faithful love. St. Paul too refers to marriage as a “great mystery,” the mystery of two becoming one, the mystery of love’s constant newness, and the mystery of giving without counting the cost only to receive more than one gave.
As written in I John: 4:18-19, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love.” Both those who fear marriage and cannot commit to vows and those who cohabit rather than marry do not love enough to make the total gift of self and do not trust God enough to let Divine Providence relieve their anxieties. It is not the institution of marriage that is archaic and in a state of disrepair but the human heart that needs to grow in faith, hope, and charity and to learn to say “yes” to God’s call to love, marriage and children.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Fisher More College and Fisher More Academy.
