The Meaning of Marriage (1/8)

THE SECRET OF MARRIAGE

Page 27

Legal scholar John White, Jr., says that the earlier “ideal of marriage as a permanent contractual union designed for the sake of mutual love, procreation, and protection is slowing giving way to a new reality of marriage as a ‘terminal sexual contract’ designed for the gratification o f the individual parties.

Page 27-29

The purpose of marriage was to create a framework for lifelong devotion and love between a husband and a wife. If was a solemn bond, designed to help each party subordinate individual impulses and interests in favor of the relationships, to be a sacrament of God’s love (the Catholic emphasis) and serve the common good (the protestant emphasis).

However Witte explains that a new view of marriage emerged from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Older cultures taught their members to find meaning in duty, by embracing their assigned social roles and carrying them out faithfully. During the Enlightenment, things began to shift. The meaning of life came to be seen as the fruit of the freedom of the individual to choose the life that most fulfils him or her personally. Instead of finding meaning through self-denial, through giving up one’s freedoms, and binding oneself to the duties of marriages and family, marriage was redefined as finding emotional and sexual fulfillment and self-actualization.

Proponents of this new approach did not see the essence of marriage as located in either its divine sacrament symbolism or as a social bond given to benefit the broader human commonwealth. Rather, marriage was seen as a contract between two parties for mutual individual growth and satisfaction. In this view, married persons married for themselves, not to fulfill responsibilities to God or society. Parties should, therefore, be allowed to conduct their marriage in any way they deemed beneficial to them, and no obligation to church, tradition, or broader community should be imposed on them. In short, the Enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any “broader good” such as reflecting God’s nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.

Marriage used to be a public institution for the common good, and now it is a private arrangement for the satisfaction of the individuals. Marriage used to be about us, but now it is about me.

But ironically, this newer view of marriage actually puts a crushing burden of expectation on marriage and on spouses in a way that more traditionally understandings never did. And it leaves us desperately trapped between both unrealistic longings for and terrible fears about marriage.

Page 30

When I met my future wife, Kathy, we sensed very quickly that we shared an unusual number of books, stories, themes, ways of thinking about life, and expectation that brought us joy. We recognized in one another true “kindred spirit” and the potential for a bond of deep friendship.

Page 30

Sexual attractiveness was not the number one factor that men named when surveyed by the National Marriage Project. They said that “compatibility” above all meant someone who showed a “willingness to take them as they are and not change them.”

Page 31

This is a significant break with the past. Traditionally, men married knowing it would mean a great deal of personal alteration. Part of the traditional understanding of marriage was that it “civilized” men. Men have been perceived as being more independent as less willing and able than women into relationships that require mutual communication, support, and teamwork. So one of the classic purposes of marriage was very definitely to “change” men and be a “school” in which they learned how to conduct new, more interdependent relationships.

Page 32

Marriage was traditionally a place where males became truly masculine: “For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery…A man who indulged in excessive eating, drinking, sleeping or sex – who failed to ‘rule himself’ – was considered unfit to rule his household, much less a politic…”

Page 32-33

Both men and women today want a marriage in which they can receive emotional and sexual satisfaction from someone who will simple let them “be themselves”. They want a spouse who is fun, intellectually stimulating, sexually attractive, with many common interests, and who, on top of it all, is supportive of their personal goals and of the way they are living now.

And if your desire is for a spouse who will not demand a lot of change from you, then you are also looking for a spouse almost completely pulled together, someone very “low maintenance” without much in the way of personal problems. You are looking for someone who will not require or demand significant change. You are searching, therefore, for an ideal person – happy, healthy, interesting, content with life. Never before in history has there been a society filled with people so idealistic in what they are seeking in a spouse.

Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.

Page 34

Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are all looking for a marriage partner who will “fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.” And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry. This is the reason to many put off marriage and look right past great prospective spouses that simply are “not good enough”.

This is ironic. Older views of marriage are considered to be traditional and oppressive, while the newer view of the “Me-Marriage” seems so liberating. And yet it is the newer view that has led to a steep decline in marriage and to an oppressive sense of hopelessness with regard to it. To conduct a Me-Marriage requires two completely well-adjusted, happy individuals, with very little in the way of emotional neediness of their own or character flaws that need a lot of work. The problem is – there is almost no one like that out there to marry! The new conception of marriage-as-self-realization has put us in a position of wanting too much out of marriage and yet not nearly enough – at the same time.

Page 36

You can say, “I want someone who will accept me just as I am,” but in your heart of hearts you know that you are not perfect, that there are plenty of things about you that need to be changed, and that anyone who gets to know you up close and personal will want to change them. And you also know that the other person will have needs, deep needs, and flaws. That all sounds painful, and it is, and so you don’t want all that.

Page 37

I have hear them say over and over, “Love shouldn’t be this hard; it should come naturally.” In response, I always say something like, “Why believe that? Would someone who want to play a professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball?’ Would someone who wants to write the greatest American novel of her generation say, ‘It shouldn’t be hard to create believable characters and compelling narrative?’” The understandable retort is, “But this is not baseball or literature. This is love. Love should just come naturally if two people are compatible, if they are truly soul mates.

The Christian answer to his is that no two people are compatible.

Page 37-38

Duke University ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas has famously made this point:

Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect of marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a whole and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is…learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

Page 40-41

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage – namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered – living life incurvatus in se. As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love…?” That is why a good marriage is more painfully hard to achieve than athletic or artistic prowess. Raw, natural talent does not enable you to play baseball as pro or write great literature without enduring discipline and enormous of wok. Why would it be easy to live lovingly and well with another human being in light of what is profoundly wrong within our human nature? Indeed, many people who have mastered athletics and art have failed miserably at marriage. So the Biblical doctrine of sin explains why marriage – more than anything else that is good and important in this fallen world – is so painful and hard.

Page 45

Paul declared that marriage is a “great mystery”…that can be understood only with the help of God’s Spirit.

Page 45-46

What is the secret of marriage? Paul immediately adds, “I am talking about Christ and the church,” referring to what he said earlier in verse 25: “Husband, love your wives as just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her..” In short, the “secret” is not simple the fact of marriage per se. It is the message that what husbands should do for their wives is what Jesus did to bring us into union with himself. And what was that?

Jesus gave himself up for us.

Page 46

As one commentator put it, “Paul saw that when God designed the original marriage, He already had Christ and the church in mind. This is one of God’s great purposes in marriage: to picture the relationship between Christ and His redeemed people forever!”

Page 47

There is so much to do that we don’t know where to start. Start here, Paul says. Do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow.

This is the secret – that the gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. That when God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind.

Page 48

Marriage is a major vehicle for the gospel’s remaking of your heart from the inside out and your life from the ground up.

The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

Source: The Meaning of Marriage: facing the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God,  by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2011)