Tag Archives: Matrimony

On Marrying Young

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Over the past 40 years, the median age of men and women getting married in the US has risen steeply.  Catholics, it seems, are no different in this regard.  A Pew Research Center study in 2014 found that only 14% of Catholics between the ages of 18-29 were married.  Marrying at a much later age has become the “new normal”.  Statistics are helpful, but they do not answer the most important question as to whether this is a good thing or not.  The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “No”.

To see why this question is answered in the negative, we must first make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural.  Normality expresses to what degree a man conforms to a cultural norm.  These norms are always relative to the culture in which they are established.  In the best of all possible worlds, they are also relative to what is natural.  It is when the natural and the normal coincide that the behavior in question leads to true flourishing and happiness (in the fullest sense).  While it may be normal to get married older, it is questionable whether it conforms to what is natural.

A Natural Time to Get Married?

Marriage in itself is natural for the human person, but the question is whether the nature of marriage itself demands that the spouses wait until they are older to marry.  To address this question we must first ask how we determine what is natural.

One way that we can do this is by looking at the biological reality of the human body.  What I mean by this can be best illustrated by an example.  We know that, despite being deeply immersed in a Freudian-Kinseyan paradigm, children are not sexual beings.  If they were, then they would develop sexual capacities before the normal age of puberty (12-16).  This is why, as I have written previously, something like Drag Queen Story Hour is an abuse of childhood. 

While we might readily admit that biology reveals the grievous nature of sexualizing children, we tend to make a the same error when it comes to marriage and sexual development.  Is it reasonable to think that God made men and women sexually mature by their late teens and early 20s only to have them enter a holding pattern for up to a decade?  Perhaps you could say yes, except for the fact that they also experience their strongest libido at the same time. 

Sexual desire is the strongest desire we experience because it is meant to fuel the courage to make the necessary gift of self necessary for marriage and family life.  It is at its strongest at such an early age because it is meant to propel the man and woman out from their parents so as to become parents themselves.  The problem is that we now tell young adults that, despite the fact that they experience strong sexual desire, they are too young for marriage.  There is the obvious disconnect then between God’s design and lived reality.    

With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that there is something contra-natural about waiting so long to get married.  As mentioned, marriage in and of itself at any age is natural so we cannot say it is against nature.  It does however tend towards being contrary to the nature of marriage itself, especially because it is the foundation of the Family.  Rather than making it possible to be “fruitful and multiply” it contributes to what would more accurately be called the modern “fruitful and maintain” paradigm.  Again to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with waiting to marry in individual cases, but in the general trend and attitude towards the later marriages.

Marriage as a Life Accesory

Once we are able to grasp that younger marriages conform with God’s design for marriage, we can begin to ask why many people fail to see this.  To say that “Marriage is natural” means that it is one of the things that fulfills our nature (i.e. become virtuous).  This fulfillment comes not just because we biologically passed on our genes, but because Marriage and the Family are foundational for our moral growth.  The Family is a school of virtue, not just for children, but for the man and woman as both husband and wife and then father and mother. 

Our culture, on the other hand, treats marriage as if it is merely an add-on.  The professional has taken precedence over the personal.  Marriage is not even considered until a certain level of professional success is achieved.  The person trains himself to link fulfilment with professional achievement.  They also become very set in their ways and their capacity for self-giving in marriage and family is diminished.  We should expect the age to continue to increase unless a fundamental shift in attitude occurs.  The longer the person waits, the less they are “ready” for marriage. 

This putting of the occupational cart before the conjugal horse fails to acknowledge that, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built (Veritatis Splendor 14).  To add it into an already settled life is to risk disintegration because the true accessories have been placed before the essential.  Professional decisions are for the sake of supporting a family.  Rather than seeing education and careers as means to supporting a spouse and family, they have become competitors.  The attitude is “once I go to school and get a job, then I will think about marriage” rather than “I am choosing to be trained in this profession because it will allow me to take care of my family.”  And this attitude is encouraged even by well-meaning Catholics.

The Idolatry of Marriage

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In a society that finds its foundation, marriage, crumbling, one can’t help but ask why so many marriages fail.  There is no shortage of theories—a search of the internet yields close to 22 million hits and counting.  They usually boil down broadly speaking to a few categories related to economics, communication and emotional availability.  While these may be the reasons listed, they are mere symptoms of the real cause.  Marriages fail when marriage itself becomes an idol.

As Christians, we believe marriage is sacred, not just because it was instituted by God, but because it was instituted to serve as the primordial sacrament.  Marriage, for anyone with even a modicum of Biblical knowledge, is the primary image that God uses to describe His relationship with mankind.  He proposes throughout the Old Testament (c.f. Is 62:5), marries mankind in the Incarnation, consummates it on the Cross (John 19:30) and invites all of creation to the wedding feast (Rev 19:7).  All of this however is prefigured in the opening words of Genesis.

Marriage in the Beginning

When Adam is made, he is given dominion over all the earth.  He has everything at his disposal, and yet He is alone with no one to share it with.  He looks at the animals, and, despite them being bodily creatures like himself, he is unable to find a suitable mate to share those things with.  Then God puts Adam into a deep sleep and from his rib He creates Eve.  When Adam looks upon her he knows he has found that mate because, even though she has a body like the animals, there is something different about her as well.

What is it that is different?  Through her body, he discerns two things.  First that she is a person and no mere animal—a person made in the image and likeness of God.  Second, that because she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” he is made for communion with her and vice versa.  In seeing the image of God, the image that sets her apart from the animals, and knowing that he is made for communion with her, he knows that he is ultimately knows that his communion is an image of the communion that he is to have with God.  It is considered the “primordial sacrament” because it is a sign of the ultimate communion that is to come—the one flesh communion of God and man in the Incarnation and the communion of saints with the communion of the Trinity. 

This natural desire that Adam experienced, this same natural desire to unite in marriage that we all experience, is meant to serve as a signpost to the infinite desire to be united to God.  But living outside of Eden the sign has faded.  Now two fallen people come together and are mostly just trying to get along.  Getting along even though they came into the nuptial pact expecting that infinite desire, the same desire that drove them to marriage in the first place, to be fulfilled.  This is why Our Lord saw the need to elevate it to the status of a Sacrament and repaint the sign in his Blood.  Now the Sacrament brings about the thing signified, union between the spouses in Christ begets union with Christ.

 

 

But even when it is not received as a Sacrament it is still a sacrament.  And herein lies the problem.  Whenever an image is confused for the real thing, the image becomes an idol.  When marriage is entered into with the expectation that it will lead to ultimate fulfilment it is doomed to fail.  The image/idol disorientation is what has lead many people to give up on marriage completely.  Once it becomes an idol it is emptied of its meaning.  Even those who decide to get married are in a precarious position because in idolizing it they are expecting their spouse to fill the God-sized whole in their heart.  When the emotional newness and excitement wears off, or their spouse turns out to be less than they were expecting (and how could they not have been?) or when someone else stimulates that excitement, they blame their spouse for not fulfilling their needs.  They are expecting their spouse to bear an infinite weight and are ultimately disappointed when they can’t.  The failure to see this is why most people who get divorced once do so multiple times afterwards.    

Raising Expectations

To think everything that has been said so far is simply a summons to lower expectations is to miss the point.  In fact it is the exact opposite.  Again as the primordial sacrament it still points to the thing signified—the union between Christ and the Church.  Instead marriage must be modeled upon that.  What does that mean practically?  First that the spouses must be willing to give of themselves completely to each other.  We only find meaning in life by making a sincere gift of ourselves (Gaudium et Spes, 24).  We only find ourselves by giving ourselves away and marriage is the place where this happens for most of us.  Marriage as an idol is focused merely on what we get out of it and when the ledger goes into the red it is time to move on.  But marriage as a sign means giving.

Marriage is not only giving, it is also taking—as in “do you take X to be your lawfully wedded …?”  Christ not only gives but receives.  Marriage requires not just a gift of self, but a reception of the other person’s gift.  This means seeing the other person as a gift and receiving the gift, brokenness and all.  Christ receives His Bride the Church with all her blemishes so that she might be made holy and spotless (c.f. Eph 5:25-30).  It is this receiving of the other that is usually the most difficult in practice.  And it is only when you see marriage as a sign, a faded and blurry sign at times, and not as an idol, that it is even possible. 

Christians unfortunately have failed to live marriage as a sign to the world.  It began when Luther de-Sacramentalized marriage making it essentially a secular institution.  The Church still recognizes all valid marriages between Baptized Christians as a Sacrament precisely so that the grace of the Sacrament can overcome the secularizing weight.  This secularizing of marriage has even crept into Catholic circles and is really at the heart of the push for giving Communion to those in irregular unions.  Now the sign must become a counter-sign to the world and we must, as Catholics, let the truth of marriage shine forth.