Why Marriage?

In this week’s Newsweek, two authors list a host of reasons against marriage. I’ll give you one reason for it.

In “I Don’t,” Jessica Bennett and Jesse Ellison say, “Happily ever after doesn't have to include ‘I do.’” They list off all the things that remove the need for marriage:

• Legal protection? You can get a lawyer to litigate anything.
• Financial security? A rising number of women are more educated and higher-wage earners than their potential husbands. Besides, federal tax laws take more from dual-income households than from singles.
• Stability? “The numbers are familiar but staggering: Americans have the highest divorce rate in the Western world; as many as 60 percent of men and half of women will have sex with somebody other than their spouse during their marriage.”
• For children? “We know that having children out of wedlock lost its stigma a long time ago: in 2008, 41 percent of births were to unmarried mothers.”
• For sex? “Please. As one 28-year-old man told the author of a new book on marriage: ‘If I had to be married to have sex, I would probably be married, as would every guy I know.’”

Now that last line's a line to think about.

Of course, some of their stats need closer examination. For example, they point to Europe, where the majority of couples live together without tying the knot and yet “their divorce rate is a fraction of our own.”

Um, I’m guessing it’s a no-brainer to identify why the divorce rate within a population that tends not to marry would be lower than the rate within a population that does.

Still, they amass a daunting list of reasons why marriage is unreasonable.

But its not just that they consider marriage unreasonable. Adults in their 20s and 30s are commitment-shy because of their upbringing. For one thing, the authors say, they were brought up to believe they could do and have anything:

We are the so-called entitled generation, brought up with lofty expectations of an egalitarian adulthood; told by helicopter parents and the media, from the moment we exited the womb, that we could be "whatever we wanted"—with infinite opportunities to accomplish those dreams. So you can imagine how, 25 years down the line, committing to another person—for life—would be nerve-racking. (How do you know you've found "the one" if you haven't vetted all the options?) "We've entered the age of last-minute tickets to Moscow, test-tube children, cross-continental cubicles and encouraged paternity leaves," write the authors of The Choice Effect, about love in an age of too many options. The result, they say, is "a generation that loves choice and hates choosing."

Oh, I’m gonna use that last line sometime soon: “loves choice and hates choosing.” But the authors point to another aspect of their upbringing that makes them commitment-averse:

Boomers may have been the first children of divorce, but ours is a generation for whom multiple households were the norm. We grew up shepherded between bedrooms, minivans, and dinner tables, with stepparents, half-siblings, and highly complicated holiday schedules. You can imagine, then—amid incessant high-profile adultery scandals—that we'd be somewhat cynical about the institution. (Till death do us part, really?) “The question,” says Andrew Cherlin, the author of The Marriage-Go-Round, “is not why fewer people are getting married, but why are so many still getting married?”

And yet they are. The authors say:

Maybe it's a testament to American crass consumerism, but despite those odds, we still manage to idealize the ceremony itself, to the tune of $72 billion a year. Weddings are the subject of at least a dozen reality shows; a Google search for "bridezilla" turns up half a million hits; and there are four different bridal Barbies.

In fact, they hedge their bets in the article:

A caveat: check with us again in five years. We're in our late 20s and early 30s, right around the time when biological clocks start ticking and whispers of "Why don't you just settle down?" get louder. So…we permit you, friends and readers, to mock us at our own weddings (should they happen).

Jessica Bennett and Jesse Ellison lay out a compelling argument against marriage. But I have one compelling argument for marriage:

God’s marriage to us, his people.

“I wrapped my cloak around you…and declared my marriage vows,” he said in Ezekiel 16:8 (NLT). Here God is comparing his relationship to Israel like the relationship of a husband to a wife. The text continues, “‘I made a covenant with you,’ says the Sovereign Lord, ‘and you became mine.’”

The Bible says God chose us (Ephesians 1:4), but he did more than that: He publically declared his commitment to us in covenant.

Really, the whole story of the Bible is a story of God’s faithfulness to his marriage vows, so to speak. Over and over again, the Bible says that he stands and stays with his people because he is a God who keeps his promises:

Leviticus 26:44-45 (NLT), “I will not cancel my covenant with them by wiping them out. I, the Lord, am their God. 45I will remember my ancient covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of Egypt while all the nations watched. I, the Lord, am their God.”

Deuteronomy 4:31 (NIV), “For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath.”

2 Kings 13:23 (NIV), “But the Lord was gracious to them and had compassion and showed concern for them because of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Isaiah 54:10 (NIV), “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed,/ yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken/ nor my covenant of peace be removed,”/ says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

Notice in all of those verses that God points back to his vows, his covenant, and says, “I’m sticking with my people because I’ve made a promise. The integrity of my word is on the line.”

The fact that God made a covenant with his people is the Number One reason why you should make a covenant with your partner. Huge numbers of couples, even those who know Christ, have decided to live together, maybe even have children together, without a wedding ceremony. But if we want to reflect the heart of God to the person we love, one thing we need to recognize is that God was willing to announce his love for us publicly. He was willing to declare his commitment to us before the world. And when things get tough in his relationship with us, over and over again in the Bible we see him saying, “I made a promise to my people, a public promise, a covenant, and I’m sticking with it.”

I acknowledge this argument doesn’t carry weight with anyone who hasn’t experienced God’s covenant love. But as believers, we get married--and we stay married--because God has set the example for us and we want to follow God.