The Meaning of Marriage summary

It’s true that almost half of all marriages end in divorce, but that doesn’t mean every married couple has a fifty-fifty chance of ending up in a courtroom arguing over who gets to keep the family pet.

So what variables are at play? Well, there are three factors: age, education, and when you have kids.

According to the legal scholar John Witte, marriages have been “privatized.” Rather than being public contracts between couples and their communities, they’re now private contracts between individuals. As a result, duty has been replaced by the pursuit of individual happiness through personal, emotional, and sexual self-actualization.

In theory, this change promises to liberate us as individuals. But, in practice, there may be unintended consequences.

In 1995, the American humorist John Tierney wrote an article entitled “Picky, Picky, Picky” in which he described how we’ve ended up making the “perfect” the enemy of the “good.”

He argues that by setting our standards so high in matters of the heart, we’ve become consumed by the “Flaw-o-Matic” – a thought pattern in our brains that spots trivial flaws in potential mates. Tierney listed some of the reasons his friends had given for breaking off relationships: mispronouncing Goethe’s name, wearing the wrong socks, working at the wrong company, or being seven pounds overweight.

Some contemporary Christian thinkers reference two types of relationships in Western societies – consumer and covenantal.

Consider your grocer. As long as she’s giving you great produce at an acceptable cost, the relationship lasts. But if a new grocer offers you a better deal, you might switch – your individual needs come first, after all. This is a consumer relationship.

The Book of Genesis recounts God creating the world. When he looks at his creation, he repeats that “it was good” seven times. But after creating the first man, Adam, this changes: “It is not good that man should be alone.”

Many Christians interpret this as a statement about human nature. Our “vertical” relationship with God is not enough; we also need “horizontal” relationships with other humans. Even in paradise, it seems, loneliness is a terrible burden.

Life is like a great costume ball and we’re the masked ball-goers. At midnight, though, the time comes to throw off our masks and reveal who we really are.

This striking metaphor comes from the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. During his life, it was customary to wear a mask to balls. For the first part of the festivities, everyone remained masked while they ate, drank, danced, and talked. No one knew who anyone was until midnight when everyone removed their masks and revealed their true identities.