A study recently released by the US Census Bureau found that in the past two decades, the number of couples that cohabitate had nearly tripled from 6 million to 17 million.  The study found that the increase was due to the fact that “cohabitation has become increasingly accepted by a broad swath of social and demographic groups.”  Most people view this as a sign of “progress”, no longer bound to the Victorian restraints imposed by marriage.  It is most certainly progress, but it is likely not progress in the direction of anything other than cultural decay and collapse.  The institution of marriage is vital to the life of every society such that without it, the society is sure to crumble.

All of us sort of intuit why this might be the case but having plummeted into the morass created by the Sexual Revolution, we may not be able to articulate why this is the case.  Nevertheless, if we are to turn back to a society built upon marriage, then we ought to grasp the logic as to why this is so.  Thankfully, the great Counter-revolutionary to the Sexual Revolution, Pope St. John Paul II, has already done the intellectual heavy lifting for us in his book Love and Responsibility.  Written just prior to the “Salacious Sixties”, the then Fr. Wojtyla provided an intellectual basis for why the institution of marriage matters.  We would do well to examine his argument in order to apply the tonic to our decadent culture.

The future Pope set out to examine how erotic love develops and matures between members of the opposite sex.  In order to mature, the strong feelings that govern the relationships must always be subordinate to the true value of the person as a person.  When we fall in love with the feelings that the other person stimulates in us, rather than the person who stimulates those feelings, then love can never mature.  In fact, rather than being the basis for love, it becomes its exact opposite—use.  Once this foundation is laid, Fr. Wojtyla then seeks to set up the conditions by which love can truly mature, and one of which is the Institution of Marriage.

Marriage as an Institution

As the word institution suggests, Marriage is something that is established or instituted in accord with the concept of justice.  Marriage justifies, that is makes just, sexual relations between two people.  It does this by ordering them to their proper ends.  In other words, Marriage ensures that sexual relations between a man and a woman are governed both by commutative justice and social justice. 

With respect to commutative justice, that is, the justice that governs the relationship between two people as equals, Marriage protects conjugal love from the threat of use.  There is a vast difference between a concubine or a mistress and a wife—the former implies a relationship of use while the latter one of love.  Likewise, love is always attached to the value of the person as a whole and not just their sexual value.  Therefore, because the value of the person never changes, love must last forever.  This is why Marriage, as an expression of this love, is naturally indissoluble.  By committing one’s life to loving the other person, Marriage justifies sexual relations between the spouses.

This is also why sexual relations between deeply committed people, even if they are engaged say, is always wrong.  “Pre-ceremonial” sex ignores the fact that a Wedding is no mere convention or ceremony, but an entering into the institution of Marriage.  A new reality comes into being when vows are exchanged and it is this new reality that justifies sexual intimacy between the spouses.  Prior to the wedding there was no permanence, afterwards there is.  The permanence of the relationship rests upon the free choice of the spouses.  And because sexual relations always carry with them the possibility of becoming permanently parents, there must be a permanent commitment which justifies their sexual expression.  It is just that a child be conceived from within a marriage because only the institution of marriage forms the proper foundation for the institution of the family.

There might be a tendency to think that love between two people is a completely private affair between “two consenting adults”, but, according to John Paul II, the couple soon “realize that without this [social] acceptance their love lacks something very important.  They will begin to feel that it must ripen sufficiently to be revealed to society.”  There is a need to both keep private the sexual relations deriving from love and on the other hand a need for there to be a social recognition of this love that comes only through marriage. 

Why Marriage Matters for Society

This felt need directs them to fulfill the requirements of social justice.  This may not be immediately obvious, especially when we live in such an individualistic society, but it becomes clearer when we recognize that society itself is built upon the foundation of the family.  The institution of marriage is necessary to signal a mature union exists between two people, a mature union that is based upon a permanent love.  Thus, society can be built upon that foundation. 

One need not imagine too hard what a society would look like when its foundations were unstable or constantly being swapped out, especially given our current plight.  It looks like a society in which cohabitation numbers are tripling and marriage rates are falling.  It looks like a society that is committing cultural suicide.  There cannot be a society without stable families and there cannot be stable families without permanent marriages.  A sane society would enact legislation that protects families and legislates justly regarding the family by recognizing the rights and duties of marriage since the family is an institution based on marriage.

Instead, the inmates are running the asylum.  We feed a “divorce industry” with lawyers, social workers, and judges to name a few whose economic sustenance comes from the breakdown of marriage.  We make divorce “no-fault” and make single parenting “easy” with day-care, public schools, welfare and WIC (why isn’t there a FIC by the way?).  The family is then replaced by an elaborate bureaucratic machine that seeks to control the formation of children so that they grow up to see this as “normal”.  Meanwhile we all accept this as an accident rather than as a planned attack to seize the power of the family.  The sexual revolution was never about liberation but about control and the totalitarians will win unless we begin to think and act like our saintly Counter-revolutionary is instructing us.