In Defense of Marriage
It’s more than statistics. For marriage to work, we must understand the history and how we’ve been driven toward consumer based relationships.
*This article is one half of a friendly debate between our founders—The Argumentative Penguin and Benjamin Sledge—with opposing viewpoints. I highly suggest reading both sides of the debate. You can read The Penguin’s argument here.
My first marriage failed as spectacularly as it began. A month and a half before I deployed to Afghanistan, I met my ex-wife, and we began dating. We stayed together throughout my year-long deployment, but the man she’d known before my departure was remarkably different. Despite wrestling with my demons from my time overseas, we weathered the storm, got engaged, and married in 2005. By 2006, however, I was back overseas, this time in Iraq. A year into my 15 month tour of duty, I called home only to have her inform me she’d filed for divorce. I found myself a divorced combat veteran at the supple young age of 27, practically hitting every troubled veteran stereotype. Disillusioned by the concept of marriage and monogamy, I wondered if I’d ever settle down again, let alone get married.
During my divorce, I lived on my best friend’s couch in Austin, Texas, after I returned home and we’d often talk about relationships. He’d been engaged and also had his relationship implode. We debated things like compatibility and morals. After all, who the hell leaves their spouse while they’re fighting a war? I also felt my ex-wife had never met my needs, and she reciprocated the mutual feeling. Perhaps marriage didn’t make sense, and couples were destined for failure from the start.
My story isn’t unique, however. While the specifics may vary, I suspect many readers have experienced a divorce or found themselves in a romantic relationship that turned out as terrific as The Shining. Just looking at where our society appears to be headed, it’s clear that even dating someone is a mess. Pew Research from 2020 stated that 67% of respondents said their dating lives aren’t going well. 75% of respondents admitted it’s difficult to find someone to date. Granted, that poll was at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, but as time has progressed, I’ve yet to hear happy reports about any type of relationship. To combat our collective disappointment, I’ve heard people opt for “partnerships” or long-term commitments as opposed to marriage. More and more people are now wondering aloud, “Why get married anyway? What’s the point?”
I suppose that all depends on how you look at history, culture, commitment, and love.
A brief history of marriage
Up until roughly 250 years ago, marriage was not kind to women. While the concept of marriage dates back some 4,000 years, its primary function was to bind women to men for the purpose of securing heirs, formalizing family alliances, or advancing social status — rather than for love or matchmaking. Ask any social or cultural anthropologist and they’ll tell you that in antiquity, women were considered property. In cases of infertility, men could divorce their wives or send them back to their family of origin. This contributed to why polygamy existed — to produce more heirs. Even in the Greek and Roman cultures, which are often romanticized in shows like Rome or Spartacus, men did not treat women with love or affection. Whereas in modernity a father will hand the bride over to a husband in a tender moment, in Greece, the father would state, “I give you my daughter to sow for the purpose of producing legitimate children.” Yikes, right? Additionally, married Greek and Roman men had the liberty of indulging their sexual desires with concubines, prostitutes, or even adolescent males, while they expected their wives to remain at home and oversee domestic duties.
How then did we transition from such calloused views to embrace love and fidelity?
Say what you will about the Christian faith, but the early church’s teachings and views played a pivotal role in shaping our modern understanding of marriage. In her book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz explains that the position enforced by the Catholic Church was that a man could not leave his spouse should she not conceive, but was to be treated in love and kindness. Even the Apostle Paul, in his letters to the early Christian community, emphasized that “husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself.” Consider how this message defied the prevailing culture of Greek and Roman societies, where the concept of love had little relevance in marriages during that era.
That’s also why same-sex marriages — predominately men — were a rare occurrence in antiquity because the concept of a male “bride” took away perceived power from a man. Emperor Nero had two male “brides” and forced the Imperial Court to treat them as his wives. The Senate and Consul found the practice absurd, and outlawed same-sex unions in 342. It wasn’t until the concept of love and matchmaking took place in the 20th century that same-sex marriages gained any headway.
Despite the influence of Christianity and a shift towards monogamy and gender equality, the concept failed to fully take hold, as family alliances remained a necessary factor. Consider that if you had a family to support and were seeking agricultural land for inheritance, you’d comply with your family’s preferences for a spouse. Infidelity was also a major issue in this respect too. Men could step out on their wives and claim “mea culpa” whereas for a woman, cheating was unthinkable. Coontz, the author mentioned earlier, conveyed in an interview that during Victorian England, many believed that women didn’t possess strong sexual urges. Consequently, love and sexual fidelity were not the epicenter of marriages as they are today.
With the rise of the marketplace, women’s suffrage, and equality, love and matchmaking became a predominant factor, propelled by the rise of democracy. Marital rape, for the first time, became punishable in a court of law, and mutual attraction became the linchpin for couples getting betrothed.
However, despite these advancements, something insidious happened. We unknowingly regressed to a view our ancestors held and have commodified our romantic relationships.
The commodification of marriage
Several years ago, one of my best friend asked me to officiate his wedding. I was happy to oblige as I loved his fiancee, but gave him a warning that marriage intensifies issues and put them under a microscope. I advised him to put in additional work before the nuptials and consider counseling. He waved a dismissive hand because they’d been living together for several years and felt they were pretty much doing all the things married couples do. They had a home, joint bank account, and divided responsibility and labor. He told me he thought little would change except for a piece of paper making it legal.
I gently explained that cohabitation has scientific and psychological downsides, and that it almost worked like a mental trick where you subconsciously know you always have an out. But once the penny drops and you recognize “this is the person I’m choosing forever?” All the things that annoy you about them enter the long-term category and can become the perfect storm.
A year into his marriage, he and his wife landed in counseling and called me one afternoon to lament. “You were right about that microscope thing,” he said. “Minor issues became giants storms and the things we brushed off while dating and engaged now drive us nuts. To be honest, we’re about to split.” Luckily, they put in the hard work to grow and change, and have been married for almost ten years now.
While cohabitation seems to be the norm among couples now and often parades as wisdom to see whether you’re compatible, what we fail to realize is that it’s commodified our romantic relationships. The current Western model of dating and marriage revolves around consumerism, because of the marketing tactics employed in our day-to-day life. We can buy items with the click of a button and have them delivered the same day. We don’t have to cook, but can microwave a dinner. If we find a cheaper internet or phone provider, we’ll leave for the better price. While these things may be good for the consumer marketplace, they’re awful for relationships — romantic or platonic.
In an article entitled To Fall in Love, Click Here, Barnaby Lewer points to the way this concept has taken hold in an era of online dating:
“Internet dating has turned social relationships — which were once seen as part of the public good and defined by their use value (meeting people, finding partners, sharing photos, etc.) — into financialized commodities.”
Given this ideology, it makes sense that our modern concept of marriage has become transactional as well. You have no problem continuing to pay your electricity or phone bill as long as the company continues to provide the service, and the same is now true in how we view marriage. It’s become a contractual obligation akin to our forbearers in antiquity, expect you don’t have to bear heirs or merge families. The mindset, instead, looks something like this: “As long as we have sex, the bills are paid, there’s not that much drama, and I’m happy, I’ll stay with you.” This view — if we’re brutally honest — is self focused and narcissistic because it revolves around your needs, and negates your partner. If marriage is transactional, then when one party isn’t paying the bill, you’ll split.
You might very well be saying, “You’re proving the Penguin’s point with ease — marriage is indeed a mess and an outdated institution!” My question to you is how is our modern view of relationships, marriage, and dating any different from our brutish past? When women couldn’t bear an heir, men were free to leave, and now, because we have such a difficult time with commitment, we always have an out. We can live with each other indefinitely without ever giving all of ourselves to the other person, because doing so entails the risk of rejection and potential failure. Why not have multiple relationships or choose a billion fish in the sea, because your happiness is utmost after all, right? Hell, you might say you love the other person — and you might as there are varying degrees of love — but it’s a cheap imitation of the love we all want because the option to never fully commit is always on the table. What we really want — if we’re honest — is a love that is sacrificial, kindhearted, willing to bear our burdens when we stumble, and where the other person sees all our flaws and still sticks around.
Anything less than that type of love is something else. I don’t know what it is, but I sure as hell wouldn’t call it true love, and I doubt you would either.
What’s love got to do with it?
“Over the years you will go through seasons in which you have to learn to love a person who you didn’t marry, who is something of a stranger. You will have to make changes that you don’t want to make, and so will your spouse. The journey may eventually take you into a strong, tender, joyful marriage. But it is not because you married the perfectly compatible person. That person doesn’t exist.” — Dr. Timothy Keller
I suspect many, including the Penguin, assumed I would rattle off the benefits and data supporting why marriage is a positive force in the modern world, rather than emphasizing the aspects of love and commodification. That’s easy to do. I could tell you that married couples typically experience better mental health, greater happiness, decreased feelings of loneliness or depression, and a more profound sense of community as they age, as opposed to unmarried individuals or couples cohabitating. Even the effects on parenting are profound. Nothing has impacted me more than a study from Johns Hopkins quoted in Dr. Joshua Straub’s book, Safe House. He states:
A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine set out on a 30-year study to find if a single related cause existed for five major issues: mental illness, hypertension, malignant tumors, coronary heart disease, and suicide. After studying 1,377 students over thirty years, the most prevalent single cause wasn’t what everyone thought. They found that the most significant predictor of these tragedies was a lack of closeness to the parents, especially the father.
While these facts have their merit, they ultimately miss the point. Depending on how you view and treat a marriage will determine your views on love. If love is perfectly acceptable being commodified, then marriage won’t make sense. But if that’s not what you want, then there’s a much harder and selfless path.
Despite the implosion of my first marriage, I had to confront the harsh realization that I treated it like an average consumer would. With time, I came to recognize that I could continue in the same manner, look solely for the benefit and reciprocation, and never fully commit to another person. On paper, it looked like the better option. I’d always have an out in the event things took a turn for the worse. I could even love multiple people and sleep with them, enjoying the freedom that comes along with it. The question I had to wrestle through was whether that was love, because genuine love carries risk and vulnerability. No one has defined this more aptly than C.S. Lewis in his book, The Four Loves. He writes:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
When I re-married at age 30, I discovered this truth firsthand. My wife and I have been married for 12 years now, and the past year has been the most challenging, but has also transformed our relationship into the best it has ever been. I no longer recognize the woman I married on a hot Texas day in August 2011. That version is dead and gone, as I’m sure she’d say the same about me. We’ve evolved and changed, as has our love over the years. Are we compatible? I don’t know, and that’s where the element of risk comes in. What I can state is that we choose each other daily. To me, this is the epitome of love because it blends romantic affection with sacrificial duty. It encompasses both a contractual and covenantal nature. At times, we carry it out of sheer will, while on other occasions, the intense feelings are present. But maintaining this kind of love demands daily risk and vulnerability.
That’s also the scary part, because my wife knows everything about me and vice versa. There are no stones left unturned, no secrets concealed. She sees every aspect of me — the beauty and the broken — and chooses to stay. That may not sound sexy, but to control our choices is the one freedom we can truly exercise in this life. Feelings fade and emotions wax and wane like the moon, but to choose someone despite yourself and their shortcomings? That’s a love we all want — to be completely seen and known yet still cherished. We know the scoundrels we really are when our heads hit the pillow at night. Despite our efforts to downplay it by comparing ourselves to others, the internal nagging murmur we all experience suggests that if we were completely known, no one would love us.
I suppose that’s what makes defending marriage somewhat difficult because of our skewed definitions of what constitutes love. As a society, we’re in love with the idea of love, yet cannot define it. I love tacos and I love my wife, but surely I do not love them the same. Instead, actual love knows our deepest hurts and acts on them. In an example of how he discovered the definition of love, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak once told a story about two drunks he encountered drinking in a gutter. One said to the other, “I love you,” to which the other drunk replied, “No, you don’t.” “Yes, I do,” the first protested, “I love you with all my heart.” “If you love me,” the second insisted, “why don’t you know what hurts me?”
To love necessitates embracing risk, vulnerability, and the capacity to understand the pains and hardships of our partners. However, when an escape route is always available, are you genuinely permitting yourself to experience that depth of connection? Thus, marriage, as a positive force, must encompass the elements of intentional love, sacrifice, and unwavering commitment. Devoid of these, you fail to fully give yourself to another person and, consequently, fall short of receiving them in their entirety. You haven’t given yourself fully to them because you’re still in a consumer-based relationship where you have an out. You’re reserving the option to exit if your needs go unmet, and how does this differ from our ancestors’ perspective on marriage, except that this time there isn’t a legal contract involved? And if it’s not a consumer-based relationship, then why the hesitation to get married? Why not go all in?
That’s why the essence of marriage extends beyond just statistics and benefits. It demands a profound understanding of love — one that transcends our model of commodification. The question we must ask is whether we’ll choose the selfless path, acknowledging that real love involves risk and vulnerability, or if we’ll always keep a parachute packed with a finger on the ripcord?
I relinquished my parachute years ago, and ever since have been able to see—and experience—the beauty of marriage. My hope is that, in reading this, you take the time to consider relinquishing yours, too.
Did I mention you should go read The Penguin’s story? Want to write your own response? Tag “Panopticon” and if we like it, we’ll include it in the publication.
