Christian Marriage Today: The Fantasies

Even though June weddings do not dominate local church calendars the way they once did (church weddings are now spread out more evenly across the year), I still find myself thinking about marriage more often in June than in most other months. This year, I've decided to think out loud, or more precisely, through the keyboard. The result will be three columns, this one and the next two. A warning: it might take still another June or two before my keyboard will let me quit harping on the subject.

Not long ago, starting a traditional marriage was an idea very much out of favor. Swinging experimentalism suggested that permanent relationships were heading straightaway toward extinction. The high divorce rate was scaring a lot of otherwise faithful couples off. (It's still too high, but at least it has leveled out.) For both men and women, getting a good purchase on separate careers made a lot more sense than getting a good rate on a joint mortgage. And living together first, ostensibly to get all the kinks worked out before closing the deal for good, often became just one more way of substituting unconventionality for commitment.

And now? Experimentation and exploration are proving dangerous and wearying. Rather than feeling more creative and genuinely intimate, a lot of people are feeling more anxious and lonely than ever. A while back, one high-wire, thirty-something friend said it well: I finally reached the conclusion that anything would be better than living this way, even getting married.

I wonder. In spite of some new-found interest in the old ways of marriage, many of the best and brightest among us are still clinging to expectations of what marriage should be that border on sheerest fantasy. For example, I continue to be regaled with pictures of marriage as the best compensation available for life's many hardships, such as money shortages, job losses, frequent moves, illness, and all around unhappiness in general. Or with naïve couples' eager anticipation of all that having children will do to make their lives less frustrating and more enhancing. Or, with romantic tales from the age of chivalry --- and their anti-matter versions from the afternoon soaps --- of preserving the quality of first love forever in a relationship in which each partner's every emotional need will be met perfectly.

Certainly, couples can become more resilient in their relationships by confronting hardships, but as a general rule, hardships are real bummers in adding zest to marriages. As are children, particularly too many of them too soon. Once, the fact that children were economic assets was all that couples needed to get busy being fruitful and multiplying. Today, children are major economic liabilities for all couples, and emotional ones also for those not mature enough to share love easily instead of demanding love greedily. Kids draw shamelessly on the emotional capital of their parents, particularly of parents already stressed out over their marriages and their lives.

The fantasy that the state of falling in love is a state that will last forever is a real humdinger of a fantasy, so much so that the very medievals who conjured it up knew better than to believe it. Back then, being beside yourself with feelings for another was confined to a partner not available either for intimacy or marriage. As the tale of Tristan and Isolde and lots of others like it cautioned, if you consummate a relationship fraught with longings like this, both you and your lover will surely die. Sadly, though, endless ecstasy remains a marriage ideal, and the predictable failure to achieve it overwhelms many lovers with disappointment, anger, and eventually, despair.

It is little wonder, really, that marriage relationships have been so volatile in recent generations. After all, what marriage could possibly fulfill the impossible expectations that many partners continue to hold for it? For all this, however, people continue to yearn for a quality of intimacy that holds out realistic hope of overcoming epidemic loneliness and meaninglessness rife in the competitive, consumption-oriented, winner-and-loser society we grandiosely offer the world as our crowning accomplishment and legacy.

And so, an even bigger question for all of us in the church: might the understanding of marriage that our tradition mediates have something after all to say to men and women who are looking desperately for more in marriage today? Our faith's answer to this question is a resounding Yes! In the next two columns, I'd like to share some thoughts about why the somber facts of marital instability and collapse that hit us in the face almost daily do not have to dissuade us from proclaiming this answer loudly and confidently.