Marriage

Unfortunately today is too busy to write my own article about marriage. However, before I block quote, link and run away 🙂 I wanted to mention a few thoughts about the culture around marriage. I have, as of today, been married for two years. A very short amount of time, true. However, it is certainly long enough to experience the vast amount of cultural negativity toward marriage that is part of the unexamined assumptions most people live by. When I tell my students I am married, they wonder why I would make such a commitment, why I don’t keep playing. They wonder why I chose to do something ‘so difficult’. It is, perhaps, the same mindset that makes it so that my students are shocked when I tell them to stop whining about college, it is supposed to be hard. That it would not be worth anything if it was all games and drinking. Anyway, back to marriage.

It seems to me that everything good, every blessing from God, has been fully poisoned in the cultural consciousness. People genuinely think that marriage is a prison and children are a curse. People are genuinely surprised when I answer the question ‘How is married life?’ with the answer ‘Good.’ rather than something like ‘hard work’ or ‘a drag’. (And I actually tone down how good life is, so as not to make miserable people jealous as well.) Now, I am 24 and will welcome my son into the world before I turn 25. I fully expect miserable people to try and spread their misery by telling me that raising children is hard, it is so demanding, you have to make so many sacrifices. But I remember that the world sees everything through a lens of moral inversion, and  marriage and children are gifts from the Lord.

So here, from PJ Media is a response to an article about the benefits of waiting until late to get married.

A recent article on Yahoo extolled “The Benefits of Marrying Later in Life.” The writer, who waited until age 46 to marry, listed the benefits to delaying marriage:

– Learning to love herself and accept her self-worth
– Time to become her own person
– Benefit of knowing who she is
– Experiencing life as her own complete person

With all due respect to the author, her list looks like a recipe for perpetual singleness. A decade or more of doing what’s best for “me” and learning to love and complete myself are not the best preparation for the sacrifices and selflessness required to be one half of a couple. Be honest: Would you want to marry someone who has spent two entire decades of her life “learning to love herself”? She’s going to be a tough act to follow.

It goes on to give four excellent reasons to get married young. It is definitely worth the read (obviously, I posted it 🙂 )