to discover what God infused into us at our baptism: traits that predispose us both to perfect love and enviable marriages. In fact, research bears this out. A major study by the National Marriage Project found that husbands and wives who regularly attend church together are both significantly happier in their marriages and significantly less likely to divorce than couples who either don’t attend church or attend separately (Wilcox and Marquardt, 2011). We’ve heard it said that Jesus Christ is “the ultimate meaning of an interpersonal relationship.” Well, of course he is. He created marriage! If we who follow His example can’t have powerful, profoundly loving marriages, then no one can.
God Is Rooting for You!
The truth is, God is rooting for your marriage. He wants you to celebrate an uncommonly joyful, passionate, soul-satisfying life together. Why? Because God wants to change the world through your marriage. Through both the way you cherish each other every day and your faithful and steadfast love through trials, God wants to show the world that the kind of love that every human heart longs for — the kind of free, total, faithful, and fruitful love that comes from his own heart — is really possible to achieve. Your mission is to be a walking Jumbotron — a giant, bright, flashing, impossible-to-ignore sign to the world — that God’s love is real, and that he wants to fill every heart to overflowing with a love that knows no bounds. He can only do that if he has couples like you to point to. Couples, like you, who aren’t afraid to do the work and celebrate the blessings that an Exceptional Marriage entails.
So, are you ready to shake things up?
Do you want to wake up every morning thrilled to start a new day with your mate?
Do you want to know what God really intended when he created marriage?
Turn the page and discover the incredible journey God intends your marriage to be!
Part One
Revealing the Vision
What makes your Catholic marriage special, and why does it matter to you? What do Catholics believe is the one reason for marrying that guarantees the lifelong relevance and success of a marriage? How does your Catholic faith increase your chances of reaching the top of the marital food chain? Why does God care that you have a happy marriage, and what is his plan to help you achieve greatness as a couple? How can you and your mate experience the love that springs from God’s own heart? Discover the answers to these questions and more.
Chapter 1
Marriage
Vive la “Catholic Difference”!
The word “marriage” means many different things to many different people. What does marriage mean to you? Have you ever wondered how your vision of marriage squares with the Church’s vision? Then again, why should you even care?
Sharing the Vision: Why Does It Matter?
Catholics mean something specific when we use the word “marriage,” and understanding that difference is critically important for you to be able to get the most out of your marriage. Why? Because how you think of marriage ultimately defines the way you build your life together. It sets up your expectations regarding the amount of effort you believe you should put into your relationship as well as the benefits you think you should anticipate from your marriage. For instance, a person who believes that marriage is just two people sharing their stuff and living under the same roof is going to be a very different kind of spouse than a person who believes marriage is supposed to be about working to achieve deep intimacy and helping each other become his or her best self. Imagine what would happen if the two people we just used as an example married each other. You’d end up with one spouse constantly chasing the other, begging for more love and intimacy, while the other felt perpetually nagged and pressured to make a fuss about something that wasn’t really worth making a fuss about.
That’s why it’s important to have a shared vision about what marriage is supposed to be (Gottman, 2011). The Church can help you and your spouse get on the same page about your expectations for your marriage. Catholicism has some very well-developed and time-tested ideas about what a good marriage should look like, and it asks couples who get married in the Church to agree to live up to that vision so that God can use your marriage to change the world by being a sign of his love to everyone you meet.
Let’s Go Shopping! or “Got Lost in the Marriage Market”
Imagine you went to the store to buy something. Cereal, software — it doesn’t matter. Suppose that although you know what you want, you don’t know which brand to buy. What do you do? Well, you could look at the checklist on the back of the box to see what this product is or does, compared to other similar products, so that you can get a sense of what you’re buying.
Now, imagine you were going to The Marriage Store to “buy” a relationship. You see several different relationship-types on the shelf, all in their own brightly colored boxes. There’s “Cohabitation,” “Civil Marriage,” “Romantic Marriage,” “Faith-Based Marriage,” and last but not least, “Catholic Marriage.” As you compare the different “products,” you might begin to notice that each of these relationship-types is largely defined by the kind of promises that it requires from the couples choosing it — or, more specifically, the vows the couple in that relationship make to each other. The promises (vows) required by the relationship ultimately define the happiness and the stability the couple can expect from the relationship.
Let’s do a side-by-side “product comparison” to help you understand the important differences between Catholic Marriage and the other marriage-type relationships on the market and why it matters to you.
Cohabitation — The DIY Relationship
Of course, cohabitation isn’t the same thing as marriage, but a lot of people don’t know that. Many people go to our metaphorical Marriage Store and walk out with a box of Cohabitation, believing they got what they came for: a kind of self-styled, do-it-yourself relationship that means “we live together and whatever else we decide it should mean.” It’s an attractive relationship-type because it doesn’t cost too much (in terms of the specific promises and commitment it requires) and seems to offer the greatest degree of freedom (in that “we can define it how we want”).
The problem is the same as the benefit, however. Because it requires so little from the couple, it also takes very little to break it. Marriage researchers (Rhoades and Stanley, 2014) observe that the reason cohabiting couples tend to break up at a much higher rate than other couples is that they tend to “slide” into living together (and perhaps, eventual marriage), as opposed to “deciding” to live together (and/or marry). In other words, first the couple begins casually sleeping together. Then the one partner starts leaving more of their things at the other partner’s apartment, and then more of their things, and more, until it “just makes sense” to stay where most of their things already are. After a while, maybe this couple has a child or two together, and now everyone (including, maybe, their kids) is asking when they’re going to get married, so they do. In other words, at no point along the way does the cohabiting couple consciously choose anything, and the lack of clear expectation and relationship goals leads to a significant undercurrent of distress and instability. As one woman reported to University of Virginia sociologist Dr. Meg Jay:
I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife. We had all this furniture. We had our dogs and all the same friends. It just made it really, really difficult to break up. Then it was like we got married because we were living together once
