The Mystery of Marriage

The institution of marriage is not doing well.

Some groups continue to uphold it in the form that prevailed in western society until recently: the permanent, exclusive union of life of one man and one woman, oriented toward the spouses’ personal development and the begetting and raising of children.

But more people are pursuing alternative romantic lifestyles. Many marry but do not have children. The “same-sex marriage” movement accepts all elements of marriage except the difference in the spouses’ sexes. Others want to expand the number of spouses, apparently without limit. Amid this confusion, it is not surprising that fewer bother to marry at all.

The fraying of marriage culture has not been for want of good reasons for marriage. Masses of research, and legal and philosophical arguments, make a convincing case for why marriage, as traditionally conceived, is one of the pillars of a decent and dynamic society.

Why have so many people been slow to embrace these arguments? Is it because reason and science cannot, after all that has been said, comprehend fully what marriage is? Many critics have said as much: that marriage as defined by traditionalists is a religious institution in disguise, defensible only by claims of special revelation that do not belong in public life. 

I suggest that the critics are right, but only in part. Reason can indeed understand the truth of the traditional definition of marriage—and the truth that civil law must uphold it—apart from any particular set of religious beliefs, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. But—as unaided reason can also understand—human beings cannot commit to marriage either without the help of a transcendent reality—which we usually call God—or, therefore, without being open to that reality by some kind of religious attitude. Understanding correctly the relationship between marriage and religion will help us understand better what needs to happen if our civilization’s marriage culture is to revive.

A Rational Proposition

The disagreement between defenders of traditional marriage and their opponents comes down to what makes a marriage. Reformists say “love” is sufficient; permanence, the complementary sexes of the spouses, and openness to children are all negotiable.

Defenders of the traditional notion, like the authors of What Is Marriage? agree in part: if “love” is all that makes a marriage, there is no reason to make the union permanent, between only one man and one woman, or tied to offspring. The reason these elements go together is their necessary link to the last of them: creating and rearing new human life, the end that distinguishes marriage from all other human associations. Societies have no future without children; only a man and a woman’s sexual union can generate them; and children develop best by far when raised by their mother and father, living together in friendship. In addition, most men and women mature and become more economically productive and law-abiding when they marry and stay married. So serious are these benefits, and so intimate and extended in time is the activity they require, that marriage is “an inherently open-ended task calling for unconditional commitment,” and, therefore, for “permanence and exclusivity.”

Countless sociological studies over decades have confirmed these truths, which have been known to practically all human cultures for millennia. And almost all societies, What Is Marriage? reminds us, “have regulated male–female sexual relationships” in law, because those relationships directly affect the common good. A husband and wife have more encouragement to be faithful to one another if public institutions—the hospital where their children are born, the school their children attend—recognize their union; and only the state has the power to enforce such recognition. From the other direction, civil laws that contradict the true nature of marriage can change many citizens’ views over time for the worse, such as no-fault divorce laws that, since their appearance in America in the late 1960s, have helped dispose people to think of marriage as impermanent.

An Unpredictable Way of Life

Yet even before then the civil law, at least in modern times, did not enforce the permanence of marriage absolutely, as it enforced prohibitions of, say, theft and murder. Natural life, the life of this world, is the state’s direct concern; if the bonds that legally tie a married couple facilitate grave harm to the natural well-being of one of the spouses, it is better that the state dissolve those ties. Recognizing that permanence in marriage is nevertheless important, traditionally (before no-fault divorce) the state set a high bar for what counted as unacceptable harm: adultery, or abuse or abandonment by one spouse of the other. 

The state can recognize that the essence of marriage must include permanence, but for its purposes it treats permanence as only an aspiration. Why might this be so? Perhaps because the choice of the spouses to marry, although it has public consequences that fall under the state’s jurisdiction, is, in its full reality, far beyond the state’s competence to comprehend and adjudicate. It is not merely an exchange of goods or services as in a contract, but an exchange of persons—beings with invisible, spiritual souls, giving themselves to each other—as in a covenant.

Such a covenant must bind a person’s freedom beyond prohibiting felonies and misdemeanors by fear of punishment, as the state does. If the spouses are to persevere in their marriage and not be miserable, they must not only be just to each other, but also “love and honor” each other, as one common wedding vow puts it—not merely sharing emotions (as many today mean by “love”) but sacrificing themselves for one another by their deeds. Each must serve the other for the other’s good—not just for his own, and not merely to avoid punishment. That requires “getting out of one’s comfort zone,” becoming a different sort of person from what one had been, doing difficult things one had never envisioned doing. One must even do them despite poverty, sickness, the failures of one’s spouse, and all the ordinary trials of life, which come without warning. 

No earthly government could ordain such comprehensive generosity by law, even one that employed totalitarian methods; not only because true love goes beyond fear of legal penalties, but because civil law by definition is a kind of rational planning, modeled on predictable patterns of human behavior. Marriage, on the other hand, is an intrinsically unpredictable way of life that pushes the limits of human nature; it calls the spouses continually to transcend their expectations for themselves, as they face challenges for which no one can plan completely in advance. Marriage is always, in some respect, a mystery. 

Conviction of the Unseen

Reason’s knowledge comes from what one has already experienced in the past; but to enter marriage is to commit oneself to living as one has not done before, and for people of whom one has imperfect or no experience: a companion with hidden thoughts and faults, and children who do not yet even exist. One could see why it might be reasonable to persevere in such a commitment, but reason alone is insufficient to move one to do it. Marriage requires also trust, or faith, a conviction of the possibility of something—in this case, a lifelong commitment between this particular man and woman—the consummation of which still lies in the future, unseen. But that faith cannot rest in the power of the state, which cannot regulate love. Nor can it rest entirely in the abilities of the spouses, because they cannot guarantee their own future rationality, let alone self-sacrificing generosity. Universal human experience shows, as Yuval Levin says, that “man is born broken;” of himself, each of us tends more easily toward vice than virtue, irrationality than rationality, what is pleasing in the moment than what is best in the long run.

The faith that marriage requires must also rest, and more than in anything else, in a reality higher than the human actors involved. A perfect, transcendent being—God, or, if one prefers, Truth—is necessary to make marriage possible. Only he could move the spouses to transcend themselves through a generosity beyond justice, and still preserve the freedom that their love requires. If spouses fail to cooperate with that divine help (as they all inevitably do to some degree), only God could make up fully for their failures in a life after this one. And only such an eternal reward, greater than this world’s material and psychological well-being, could give one hope to endure the ordinary trials of family life, as great as its joys may be.

The mystery of marriage involves man’s intimate gift of himself and his relationship to the Almighty. This truth explains why the institutions (outside the family) most fully interested in marriage are not states—whose direct interest in marriage is only its relation to political society—but communities founded on religion: the complete submission of the person, in mind and will, to God. These communities aid marriage enormously, and are normally the setting in which marriages take place, because they stand as God’s witness to marriage on earth. 

People with no formal ties to a religious community, even atheists, might be able to contract a marriage if they respect (explicitly or implicitly) universal norms of justice to which they are answerable; such an attitude is already an initial participation in religion. But someone who has known God, even simply as Truth, at some level (which is possible for each of us through our conscience) and has spurned him, making the decision to live only as one pleases, could persevere in marriage only with extraordinary difficulty. It is hard to imagine how such a person could have the will to put his preferences before another’s—indeed, he would seem to have committed himself to the very opposite. 

We cannot judge whether a particular individual has turned away from  God in this way; but we cannot deny that such a disposition is possible—or that it would, if one had it, severely impede one’s ability to do any good, especially the sublime good of marrying another person—with all the mystery of his or her freedom and flaws—for life.

Changing Attitudes

If the religious attitude is essential to marriage, it is no surprise that marriage is declining as the West’s religiosity declines. One need not be formally religious to understand some of the good of marriage, nor to enter into one; its nature, including its need to be open to the divine, can be known and desired apart from any particular religious commitment. But that is not to exclude the need for a general religious attitude, if only a good-faith disposition to submit fully to truth. Unless people are willing to subject their romantic relationships to the universal moral principles of human existence, which authentic religion guards, marriage will be much harder and rarer.

Thus the crisis of marriage in our society is not only a crisis of living according to reason; it is also, and more fundamentally, a crisis of reverence for the Author of human nature and of human marriage. If we want people to get married, we should reason with them and reform our laws according to reason and science; but more importantly we must strive for their spiritual conversion—at least their conversion to the love of truth—by our example, friendship, and persuasion, with complete respect for their freedom. That way, people will be better able to devote themselves to marriage’s requirement that they get beyond mere personal preference, and give themselves over to their spouse and the aid of Providence.

A happy consequence of marriage’s dependence more on religion than reason is that religion can build a strong marriage culture even in the absence of good marriage laws (although it may require more effort), because religion is more the substance of human society than civil laws are. Let us then have faith that, if we try to bring others to Truth, he will, somehow, in the long run, under whichever political regime we may live, move people’s hearts to recognize, and abide again by, what marriage is. 

Image by Viktar Vysotski and licensed via Adobe Stock.