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