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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 we got into our 30s. (Jay, 2013)

In the 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 were created to be in this life and to enable us to get to heaven in the next.

Learning to love one another as God loves us means that husbands and wives must be willing to learn to do the same for one another. We must be willing to do this whether we feel like it or not, and whether our spouse deserves it or not. And we must be willing to do it for life, just as God loves us as long as he lives — that is, forever. Of course, even for Catholics, love includes all those things that help us feel good about each other — romance, along with cherishing, respect, and caretaking — but it goes far beyond this as well.

As part of this loving mission for husbands and wives to become everything God created them to be in this life, and to help each other get to heaven in the next, we must understand four qualities that distinguish God’s love for us, and we must agree (at least implicitly) to live those qualities as fully as possible in our relationships. In short, couples marrying in the Church must promise to love each other freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully.

Freely

God chooses to love us freely. No one makes him do it. He makes the commitment to love us of his own free will, and he willingly sticks to that commitment even when we behave in sinful, unlovable ways. He loves us without expecting us to do anything in return to “pay him back.”

In the same way, when you marry in the Church, you are promising to learn from the Church’s wisdom how to love each other freely, even when your spouse doesn’t deserve it and you don’t feel like it. You are promising to love your spouse even through those times when you get little or nothing back and even when your spouse really makes big mistakes. That’s not to say that if you are struggling to get your needs met in your marriage you don’t have a right to seek help. In fact, the Catholic idea that love means working for each other’s good means that if you are unhappy in your marriage you have the right to expect your partner to work through that with you, just like God works with us through the hard times in our relationship with him. Loving each other freely and without limits isn’t easy, and sometime we need to get help to figure out how to do it. Regardless, when promising to love each other freely, both of you are promising to be “all in” and willing to give yourselves to each other, even when doing so stretches you in surprising ways.

Totally

God loves us totally. He doesn’t hold anything back. He wants to give every single part of himself to us, and he wants us to give every part of ourselves back to him. He longs for us to be totally one with him (Jn 17:21). Indeed, the entire point of the Christian walk is ultimate union with God. (For more on this, see Greg’s book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart).

Similarly, husbands and wives are called to love each other totally, with no reservations. It is tempting for husbands and wives to put limits on their love: “I won’t share this part of my life, my thoughts, my feelings, my dreams, my body, or myself with you.” Catholics understand this temptation as the result of the same sin that ruptured the union between God, man, and woman in the Garden of Eden at the dawn of creation. It may be natural to want to place these kinds of limits on our love for each other, but Catholic couples must view these limits as obstacles to be overcome, not as the expected state of affairs. God respects our limitations, but he expects us to transcend those limitations if they represent obstacles to his love. In the same way, couples can be respectful of each other’s brokenness and limitations, but they have every right to expect that they both will do everything they can to heal from that brokenness and overcome those limitations if they present any kind of obstacle to their marital love. It is this total gift of self that makes God’s love for us truly intimate and makes a marriage modeled after God’s love an “intimate partnership” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 48).

Faithfully

God loves us always and no matter what (Ps 100:5). God, who has the busiest schedule in the universe, never lets anything come between himself and his commitment to love you totally (Rom 8:31-39). He won’t ever abandon you so that he can go love someone else who is more lovable. He won’t let all the things he has to do stop him from giving you as much of him as you want or need. God’s love is indissoluble and never ending.

In the same way, a marriage founded on God’s love must be unbreakable (Mk 10:9). Even more than simply being able to count on our spouse never abandoning us, the faithfulness that characterizes marital love tells us that we have a right to expect that our spouse will not let other people, commitments, or obligations get in the way of loving us fully — and vice versa. Our spouse comes first and has a right to the best of us, not just the rest of us. Our marriage must be given priority, because it is our best chance to learn how to love as God loves, to become everything we were created to be, and receive the support we need to get to heaven.

It is true that, in a fallen world, other responsibilities and other relationships may sometimes compete with, or outright threaten, the primacy of the marriage, but Catholic couples understand this as an obstacle to be overcome, not something to accept. Catholic husbands and wives have a right to expect that their marriage will reflect the faithful character of God’s love, meaning that they will always work to place each other first and above all others.

Fruitfully

Because God is love, and love is the commitment to work for the good of another, God is always doing more, creating more, loving more (Gen 1-2). God’s doesn’t have to create — he doesn’t have to do anything — but he loves to create, and he loves to love that creation. At the same time he is creating, he is doing things to help his creation flourish (Lk 12:27). God doesn’t hoard all of his love to himself or to some small, select group. Love demands to be shared, so God looks for more and more ways to share his love with his creation. In all these ways, God’s love is fruitful.

Similarly, Catholic couples recognize that as wonderful as their love for each other is, it demands to be shared. They know that the more they share their love, the more it grows. So they do two things.

First, they welcome children as a gift from the Lord. They know that one of the most beautiful ways to celebrate their love for each other is to allow God to create another person out of that love, born to be a witness and visible sign of the power of the couple’s closeness and commitment to each other. The couple that is open to life is open to receiving everything each other has to give.

The second way the Catholic husband and wife exercise the fruitfulness of their love is by working to nurture not only their children but also each other and all of the people in their life so that everyone they come in contact with might come a little closer to being their best selves because of their influence. Catholic couples are committed to doing everything they can to help all with whom they are in a relationship to fulfill their potential as people of God. In this way, Catholic couples exercise their call to spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, as well as physical fatherhood and motherhood.

Your Mission

Imagine what a marriage that is committed to living out, in an authentic way, this ideal of free, total, faithful, and fruitful loving would look like. THAT is the kind of love that truly has the power to fill your hearts, change the world, and call others to Christ!

That said, the mission of living out the Catholic vision of marriage isn’t easy; and because of both sin and our fallen human nature, it doesn’t come naturally. In particular, there are two major enemies that will come against you as you strive to live this vision of a free, total, faithful, and fruitful love in your marriage every day — namely, addiction to comfort, and a game we call “Marital Chicken.”

Addiction to Comfort

In our experience, more than communication breakdowns, infidelity, abuse, or any other issue, the biggest problem facing marriage is that husbands and wives tend to love their comfort zones more than they love each other. Human beings are absolutely addicted to their comfort. This is the root of almost every other marital problem that exists (and frankly, the primary enemy of living a holy life, which is why overcoming this tendency in marriage is so important spiritually as well as relationally).

All of us struggle to love our spouse the way he or she needs to be loved. Instead, we would rather do what we want to do for our spouse and then call that “being loving,” regardless of what our mate actually needs from us. We could be more present, more romantic, more sexual, a better listener, or a more attentive mate; but, to be perfectly honest, we’re tired and just a little too comfy in our own corner of the house. It happens to all of us — men and women. We are called to be Christ to our mate, but too often “Christ” is sacked out on the sofa, hiding out in a hobby or job, or out saving the rest of the world instead of actively searching for the hundred or so ways he or she could literally be a savior right at home.

Loving our comfort zone more than our spouse threatens our promise to love freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully by sending the message, “When push comes to shove, you can count on me to do what I want, not what you or our marriage needs.”

Marital Chicken

The second insidious obstacle to love is the game of Marital Chicken. When a couple plays, grown-ups sit around whining, “If only you were more romantic [or sexual, helpful, complimentary, emotional, rational, etc.], maybe I would be more romantic [or sexual, helpful, complimentary, emotional, rational, etc.]. But I know you. You’ll never change!”

Playing this game allows us to avoid confronting our own fears of intimacy while getting to feel self-righteous at the same time. As you can imagine, the game is fairly addicting. What couples playing Marital Chicken forget is that they are not really responsible to their partners for living out those loving qualities. Rather, such couples must become more affectionate (or sexual, helpful, complimentary, emotional, rational, etc.) because that is the person they want to be — because that is the person God is calling the couples to be. When we die and God asks us if we lived out our vocation to love, we really don’t think the Almighty is going to accept an excuse such as “Well, Lord, I would have, if only my spouse had been more [fill in the blank].”

Part of being Christ to each other involves being loving, not because our mates deserve such generosity (we so seldom deserve to be loved) but because our Christian dignity requires this of us. As C. S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children may be sure that at some times … [they] are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.”

Loving our mates the way Christ would love them — whether they “deserve” it or not — is absolutely essential to our own growth as Christians. To reject this responsibility is to reject God’s call in our lives and injure our relationship with him. “As you did it to one of the least of these … you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).

By refusing to respond to our call to love, too many of us offend our own dignity, destroy our own self-esteem, and foster alienation in our marriages. We are constantly being tempted to play manipulative games with our mates, valuing our own convenience and comfort above all else. When we do this, husbands and wives slowly turn each other into “bitches,” “avoiders,” or — at best — shriveled-up, bitter, emotional scorekeepers. What we need to be doing is turning each other into saints. Thank God, by learning how to use the graces of marriage, we can. Nothing can come between those couples who believe the fulfillment of their identities in Christ is inextricably tied to the success of their marital partnership. Nothing can embitter those couples that understand their role in preparing each other to share the joy of God’s heavenly kingdom. When a husband and wife respond to their innate call to love and work to fulfill each other’s Christian destinies, they open the door to a truly vital, loving, spiritual, sacramental marriage. They guarantee that they will remain both faithful and joyful together through good times and bad, wealth and poverty, sickness and health, loving and cherishing each other until they deliver their mate to the heavenly Father, who will smile upon them and say, “Well done, [my] good and faithful servant” (Mt 25:21).

Living the Dream: Because You’re Worth It!

Living this vision of marriage and overcoming the common challenges to this vision takes spending more time, commitment, and energy on your marriage than many people do. But isn’t it worth it? If you do this work, you can have the kind of marriage that will make the angels smile and the neighbors sick with jealousy! If you commit to this work, you will have the kind of marriage that fills your days with true joy, real passion, incredible depth of meaning, and surprising strength in times of trial. In short, you will have the love your heart longs for — the love that comes from God’s own heart. You will experience a love that will mold and shape both of you as a couple into everything you were created to be in this life and enable you to celebrate heaven as the Eternal Wedding Feast (Rev 19:6-9)!