traditional path to marriage, couples have to publicly and intentionally choose to increase their commitment (to each other) and decrease their options (to date others) by doing things like “going steady” or getting engaged, and, ultimately, getting married, and submitting to all the rituals surrounding those public declarations. By contrast, the cohabiting couple doesn’t really choose anything. The relationship just sort of happens to them — and they get locked in without expecting it. One day, one or both of the partners wakes up and says, “How did I get here?” This usually marks the beginning of the end of the relationship or, at least, leads to an extended period of time where one partner wants more from the other person but continually settles for less in the hopes that one day the other partner might decide to want those things too.
Although the Cohabitation package appears to be an attractive option in The Marriage Store for its freestyle, do-it-yourself nature, research shows that the lack of formal, public, conscious commitments ultimately undermines both the satisfaction and stability of the relationship, making cohabiting couples up to 200 percent more likely to separate than their married counterparts, even if they get married (Doughty, 2010).
Civil Marriage — Public Promises
Next, you pick up the box marked “Civil Marriage.” It looks sturdy. It’s been around a while (in fact, it’s been recognized as a legal institution since about 1800 B.C., starting with Hammurabi, two-thirds of whose famous “code” involved marriage law). On the comparison chart on the back, you notice that Civil Marriage requires you to make a certain set of basic, but important, public promises. Essentially, if you purchase this marriage product, you must promise to share your stuff with each other and claim any children you produce together. Your things aren’t just occupying your partner’s space. You now must agree to give your partner a legal claim over those things. Likewise, any children you have are definitely your shared responsibility under the law. You don’t just get to wander off quietly and hope someone else will take on the responsibility of parenthood — not without some difficulty, anyway.
With those responsibilities come certain rights. You have the right to expect your partner to help provide for your needs. You have a right to expect your partner to provide financially and emotionally for your children. These are significant and important promises, and you must agree to them if you want to “buy” this “product” from The Marriage Store. Making these specific promises in a public forum doesn’t guarantee lifelong marriage, but studies consistently show it does significantly increase the likelihood that a couple will remain happily together over the long haul, because people are much more likely to stick to more specific promises, especially when they are made out loud and in the open.
Romantic Marriage — Making it Personal
Then, you look at the box marked “Romantic Marriage.” Romantic marriage offers all the benefits and promises of civil marriage (which serves as its foundation) plus whatever else the couple decides to promise to each other. Those “extras” could be anything. We actually saw a wedding reality show where the wife vowed to bake the husband red velvet cake once a month, and the husband promised the wife to take the trash out … if it was raining.
The point is, in Romantic Marriage the spouses put their stamp on the relationship and express, through their particular vows, what they think a happy marriage should be. These extra promises imply that there should be some kind of personal investment, some kind of intimacy, but these promises don’t often clearly define what that investment should look like.
Despite this couple’s best intentions, sometimes the extra promises are “too small” and don’t allow for growth. For example, what if the husband in our example above decided he would prefer his wife to make German chocolate cake one month? Is that a breach of their agreement? Other times, these vows are so vague and general they sound good but mean little. For instance, what does it really mean to “always see you as my other self?” Those are pretty words, but what does it commit you to, exactly? What do you have a right to expect from each other for having made such a vow?
The problem with Romantic Marriage is that it tries to glue things on to basic Civil Marriage that the couple may or may not want 20 years from now or may not really understand even from day one. Although it sounds admirable enough to want make your marriage your own, writing vows that will remain relevant, compelling, and meaningful over the course of a lifetime requires a depth of wisdom and breadth of perspective that few, if any, couples really have, not to mention a degree of foresight that is impossible to have. That can lead to a lot of confused expectations and anger later on when the promises the couple make to each other can’t stand up to the hard realities of a long life together.
Faith-Based Marriage — A Promise to Bear Witness
Next, you look at the box labeled “Faith-Based Marriage.” In truth, there are as many different types of Faith-Based Marriages as there are faith traditions, but they all have two things in common.
First, they all agree to at least do what Civil Marriage does. Second, they require that the couple give up their right to define marriage as they want to. Instead, the couple must agree to build their lives around that particular faith’s vision of what marriage should look like. In a Faith-Based Marriage, the couple gives their religious community the right to tell them what their love for each other should look like.
What would motivate a couple to do this? Presumably, because the couple believes what that faith-community believes about life and love, and because they would be proud to be examples of that vision in their own lives. The couple that actually chooses a Faith-Based Marriage (as opposed to couples who simply want a pretty church to serve as a backdrop to their self-styled Romantic Marriage) recognizes that, as much as they love each other, they still have a lot to learn about love, life, and marriage. They want to learn what their faith community — which has been praying about and discussing these topics for generations, if not for millennia — has to teach them.
There are several benefits to this approach. By agreeing to turn to their faith-community to help them learn what marriage should look like, the couple establishes a clear, shared vision of the kind of husband and wife they need to be to each other. Further, they receive an objective way to manage disputes more effectively, because their faith-community helps them manage each other’s expectations. By surrendering their right to make their marriage up as they go, the couple in a Faith-Based Marriage has a clear vision, clear expectations, and a community of support and experts (pastors, resources) to facilitate their ability to live out the vision they have agreed to apprentice.
Catholic Marriage — Bearing Witness to Free, Total, Faithful, Fruitful Love
The last product on the shelf we’ll look at is “Catholic Marriage.” Catholic Marriage is a specific type of Faith-Based Marriage. The Catholic Church does not allow couples to write their own vows because Catholics believe that marriage is supposed to present a visible sign of God’s own love for the world (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] 1639), and so they must make promises to learn to live that love. That’s a tall order — one that vows including sincere but incomplete human promises (like baking a monthly red velvet cake) can’t begin to compete with. If a couple is going to be a faithful sign of God’s own love for the world, then they need to learn what God’s love looks like. Who better to teach them than the Church that has been carefully tending Jesus’ legacy of love for 2,000 years?
First, in general, Catholics understand marital love, not primarily as a feeling but as a commitment to help each other become everything God created you and your spouse to be in this life and to help each other get to heaven in the next. God loves us even when we don’t deserve it, or haven’t earned it, or even don’t act in particularly likable or lovable ways. No matter what we do, he is always working to help us become everything we
