Do you want to know what God really intended when he created marriage?
Turn the page and discover the incredible journey God intends your marriage to be!
Part One
Revealing the Vision
What makes your Catholic marriage special, and why does it matter to you? What do Catholics believe is the one reason for marrying that guarantees the lifelong relevance and success of a marriage? How does your Catholic faith increase your chances of reaching the top of the marital food chain? Why does God care that you have a happy marriage, and what is his plan to help you achieve greatness as a couple? How can you and your mate experience the love that springs from God’s own heart? Discover the answers to these questions and more.
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