The question of marriage
How do we make it stronger and exclusive to who it was intended for?
Perhaps I’m not the correct messenger for the message, but sometimes the Lord uses people who don’t fit the job description. They claim that 50% of marriages in America end in divorce; well, 66.7% of mine have. I’m not going to get into the reasons why aside from the general idea of differences that became irreconcilable; fortunately since then I’ve reconciled with the Lord, in large part because of the one, unbeknownst to me, He led me to for marriage number three.
So if my critics believe I’m being a little hypocritical, that’s all right. Just hear me out.
The generation that’s dying away right now, the ones known as the Silent Generation who grew up in the Great Depression and saw their older brothers fight World War 2, may be the last one that valued traditional marriage enough to keep going when things got tough - sometimes to their detriment, but more often than not they had a happy fifty to sixty years together, ‘til death do they part. My mom and dad were like that for 61 years until my dad passed away - not saying all was a bed of roses, but they stuck it out and my mom misses my dad daily. Same went for my grandparents, although their time together was shorter in my paternal grandparents’ case because they both died rather young by today’s standards.
In the general rebellion of the Baby Boomers to traditional mores, marriage was among the casualties. They were the generation that saw no-fault divorce become law in the late 1960s, which meant that the less compatible members of the Silent Generation were the first to take advantage. Oftentimes the home that was broken was the one that belonged to these Boomers, and they were the first generation to regularly spend at least some of their childhood years as the subject of custody and visitation.
But even with the breakdown of marriage, there were some advantages to being hitched. Oddly enough, the advent of no-fault divorce coincided with the initial stages of the gay rights movement. Well before the days of the Rainbow Mafia, there was already a call for committed same-sex couples to be given the same legal treatment as opposite-sex married couples. This fight began slowly in the 1980s and found its first success in 2000 when the state of Vermont legalized civil unions for same-sex couples. A few years later, the Rainbow Mafia stomped its feet and said that wasn’t good enough, demanding the same marriage rights opposite-sex couples had. Some states quickly acquiesced, while others held out until the Supreme Court forced their hand with the Obergefell decision. (A decision that hopefully will go the way of Roe v. Wade someday as marriage is properly a state issue.)
So how can we put the genie back in the bottle? Well, we can’t in all respects but it’s interesting to me that most of the research that says same-sex couples divorce at a lower rate than opposite-sex couples is about a decade old - meanwhile, this man was proud of the statement made when he had a same-sex divorce. Maybe love isn’t love after all.
I’m going to revisit the second part of my opening summary statement first. Perhaps the way we make marriage exclusive for who it was intended for was shown to us by how Mississippi used its passage of a restrictive state law to become the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade. Is this a good time to point out that only two of the five justices who made up the majority on the Obergefell decision are still on the Court? The turncoat Anthony Kennedy retired along with Stephen Breyer, while the notorious RBG went to meet her Maker (as did Antonin Scalia, who was in the minority.) John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas are still there, but they’re not getting any younger. Roberts would probably rule to maintain gay marriage with his slavish devotion to stare decisis, so we’d be counting on two of the three newcomers.
There were 13 states which still prohibited same-sex marriage when Obergefell was decided, so who has the stones to set the ball rolling?
As for the actual business of a solid marriage between a man and a woman, there were four things I wish I had long ago but can pass on to you.
Maturity. By the time I was mature enough to realize what I truly wanted in a partner, I had to be in the decision to divorce the wife I had because we were no longer a viable partnership aside from getting along as best we could for the child’s sake. There are some people who are remarkably mature at a young age and others who never grow up. There’s no rush to get married as kids these days don’t seem to be mature adults until at least their mid-20s.
Knowing each other. While sometimes we hear of arranged marriages that turned out just fine (in part because the parents involved knew their children better than the children did), these days we seem to be saddled in a “hookup” society. In previous generations, though, people who got married oftentimes were the proverbial “boy/girl next door” or “high school sweethearts” who had already known each other for several years. It’s also the reason a workplace spawns relationships and marriages, since those involved are together several hours a day for a number of years. I was with my current wife for seven years before we were married so we know each other pretty well (and have the maturity and faith in God to realize it would work.)
The correct order. This one is easy, and is also a good way to stay out of poverty. Finish high school, get a job or go to college (or both, if you can handle it), get married, then have children. Working out of that order makes life a lot harder, as I’ve seen.
Faith in God. This is the most important. God has a plan for you and will lead you to the right partner. It may not be on your preferred time frame, but He will get you there if you choose to listen. Once I had that, I knew I was with the right woman.
These are just my non-expert, no letters behind my name thoughts on the matter. I think, though, that if we can establish that marriage is between a man and a woman and that there must be good, established cause to end a marriage, that the institution will grow stronger because it’s taken more seriously before it’s entered into.