First, the good news. This is a feature article from Foxnews.com called “Seven ways to stay married” [full article here]. The author starts out by explaining that he
wanted to know, “What can people do to have a happy, fulfilling, lifelong
marriage?” Rather than ask the so-called
experts (“psychologist or self-help gurus”), he went to the real experts:
“older Americans who have been married 50, 60, 70 years and more.” What he found turns out to be not that
surprising, at least the first six points (not all are really presented as
“ways”): “ 1. Marriage is hard . . . 2.
But marriage for a lifetime is worth it . . . 3. Marry someone a lot like you .
. . 4. Think small . . . 5. Talk, talk, talk
. . . 6. Stop trying to change your partner.” Number 7 looks like a new one at first: “Are
we hungry?” “The elders”, our author
tells us, recommend stopping to eat when a big fight is in the offing. As it turns out, the food is just a way of
buying some “cooling off” time, which is another tried and true technique.
The good news
about the good news is that all of these things are commonsensical and
accessible to anyone, once you know them.
My lovely bride and I have benefited from them (sometimes, it is true, after
learning them the hard way) in our own experience over twenty-eight years of
marriage. The bad news is that such
obvious things, most of which would have been conventional wisdom passed on
from mothers and fathers to their children a couple generations ago, are now presented
as revelations. But it makes sense: how
many newlyweds today can turn for advice to parents who are still married to
each other? The number is shrinking all
the time.
Which brings us
to Exhibit B: a lifesitenews.com article called “Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’” [hat tip to Fr. Z; full article here]. The article draws on a survey from the Pew
Research Center detailing attitudes about marriage among various people from
various age groups. One section focuses
on data showing that young men are growing less interested in marriage: only
29% say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things,
a six-point drop since 1997, while the number of women saying the same thing
rose nine points to 37% over the same period (perhaps a reflection of the fact
that women and their children suffer the brunt of family erosion more directly). There are plenty of other frightening
statistics in the article; I found this one particularly alarming:: “Just 20
percent of those aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in
1960.” In other words, four out of five
people in their prime child-bearing years are unmarried, which means they are
either denying their children the enormous advantages of married parents who are
committed to each other and to the family, or they are having no children at
all. Those who do get married after
thirty will have much less time for building a family (fertility starts
declining sharply after 35, here),
but a surprisingly large number of them will never marry at all, according to
Pew’s own updated summary [full summary here]
of their survey:
In
1960, some 12% of adults ages 25-34 had never been married. After 10 years, when that group was between
the ages of 35 and 44, 7% of them still hadn’t wed. By 1980, when they were in their mid-40s to
-50s, only 5% had still never married. The next cohort starting in 1970 followed a
similar trajectory. However, each new
cohort of young adults since then has had a higher share of never-married
members than the cohort that came before it.
If current trends continue, 25% of young adults in the most recent
cohort (ages 25-24 in 2010) will have never married by 2030. That would be the highest share in modern
history. (Pew Research: “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” – bold
mine)
We are headed into uncharted waters. In most western countries we are not
producing enough babies to replace our current population as it dies, and an
increasing proportion of those children who are being born are being raised
outside of the framework of the traditional family, with all the
well-documented implications for their own well-being and the health and stability
of society as a whole. And, it doesn’t
look like it’s going to get better soon: the Pew report also tells us that 67%
of those aged 18-29, the prime family-building years, are off the opinion that
“society is just as well off if people have other priorities than marriage and
children”. This is a recipe for societal suicide.
And yet . . . I’m
not ready to throw in the towel just yet.
Let’s return to the first article for a moment, on the Seven Ways to
Stay Married. We are told that marriage
is hard, “both because of the range of stresses and problems that confront all
couples, but also because of the fundamental difficulty of merging two separate
and different people into one single life.”
Nonetheless, for those who persevere, “It is a sublime experience, a
connection to another person unlike any other relationship. The elders describe it as the experience of a
lifetime.”
Now, I’m not
privy to the author’s private notes, but I can’t help but suspect he’s left
something out. Where do people find the
strength and perseverance to stay at it long enough to merge themselves ”into one single life” with
another person? In effect, to sacrifice
themselves? I find it very surprising that none of these long-married
couples seem to make any mention of Faith, or relying on the help of God. Most of the couples I know (not all, it is
true, but most) would put those things at the very top of their list. Surely many of those who spoke to this author
did the same. In any case, we know, as Psalm 127 puts it, “If the
Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor”, and also “Truly sons are a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”. Not only that, Jesus Christ provides us with
both a model of self-sacrifice, and help in bearing our own burdens.
Just as God is
the only sure foundation for individual marriages, so he is for society as a
whole. Scripture tells us to be ready with reasons
for the Hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15), which means we need
to be prepared to speak out on the importance of marriage and family; we also
know that those who are not amenable to reason can often be swayed by the power
of example, and so we need to show by our actions we honor and support marriage
and family life, and that we find it a joyous, "sublime" experience. Above all, we need to
pray for marriage, families, and for our society, and ask the Lord to yet again
“turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to
their fathers” (Malachi 4:6) and heal our wounded culture.
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