A Defense of Marriage in a Skeptical Age

The institution of marriage declares the goodness of commitment, love, and fidelity. What happens when society stops valuing it?

The foundation of a stable society is a stable family—and that starts with strong marriages. Biba Kayewich

Recent statistics out of the UK indicate that, for the first time in human history, fewer than half of British adults are married. “It is one of the oldest institutions known to humanity. ... Now, more than four millennia later, marriage could be on the verge of dying out.”

Make no mistake: The end of marriage would be a kind of apocalypse. The Greek root of apocalypse means “revelation” or “disclosure,” and the end of marriage would be the revelation of a brave new world.

Some realities are so fundamental to human life and society that a world without them can hardly be pictured, except in nightmarish visions of dystopian novels at the fringes of our imagination. These realities include the mother who cradles her baby in her arms, the friends who keep shadows at bay through laughter and song, and the soldier who takes a bullet to save his comrades.

A world without these simple realities loses an irreplaceable element of the human experience.

Even this scattering of examples falls short of the importance of one reality that forms the pillar of civilization since before civilization even had a name: marriage. That’s when a man and a woman proclaim to one another in front of the community, “I love you and I will stay with you forever.” This fundamental commitment makes all other commitments possible; it’s the contract that undergirds all other contracts.

Marriage brings stability to a society because each man and woman plants the tree of their marriage within the larger community, and in due time it bears fruit. Marriage has long been the means of perpetuating society through giving it new members, who can be raised in stable, loving homes established on the vow of commitment made between husband and wife. If marriage solemnizes love and brings new life into the community, then it’s only because of marriage that the mother holds the baby, the friends sing and rejoice, the soldier lays down his life, and the traveler comes home. It’s the lifeblood of society, its foundation, and its future.

The Foundation for Family

The foundation of a stable society is a stable family—and that starts with strong marriages. Biba Kayewich

Today, of course, the procreation of children, the only way of securing the future of a society, often happens outside of marriage. But has society become more stable and flourishing as childbirth and marriage have decoupled? The evidence suggests not.

Consider the stability that arises from monogamous, committed marriages. Children of married parents are generally raised in homes where they know that a special, sacred bond exists between their parents, a consecrated love that can weather the winds of the world. Children of married parents have a much stronger sense of security than children of unmarried parents, allowing them to develop into strong, confident, capable adults. As Harry Benson, director of research at the Marriage Foundation, stated, “Marriage may not be a panacea but it stacks the odds in favour of stable families.”

In contrast, a lack of monogamy and commitment in marriages leads to jealousy, brokenness, and abandonment. Cycles of poverty, fatherlessness, and crime are much more likely to be fueled by a society that devalues the marriage bond.

Furthermore, dishonesty, corruption, and broken promises will fester and multiply more quickly in a society that has given up on marriage. If a man and woman who love one another can’t even make and keep a vow to each other, then how can anyone else be expected to? Certainly, a business contract or a pact between people and politicians won’t be held more sacred than a covenant between lover and beloved. If one fails, so do the others.

Forever Good

Tradition teaches this as forcefully as common sense does. Century upon century of wisdom accumulates like sediment in a river, and it tells us the same thing: Marriage is important. Marriage makes human communities more stable. Marriage helps human life and society endure, and marriage has remained despite centuries of upheavals, wars, and catastrophes.

But there are more reasons why marriage remains relevant in the 21st century. Primary among them is the honor that is due to love. Marriage is a lifelong celebration of the goodness of love. If the love between man and woman—one of the most beautiful and powerful things we can experience in this life—isn’t worth celebrating, honoring, and publicly solemnizing, then what is?

Love demands expression. When we care for someone, we want to show them—and the world. We marry in part to make love manifest to the world. The lover longs to proclaim his love. This is the origin of all the great love poems of history. Shakespeare sought to immortalize someone he loves in Sonnet 18. “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

When we love something, we wish to preserve it. We want it to endure, if possible, forever. Every lover, consciously or not, desires that their love partake in some way of the eternal. Through a public vow, marriage fulfills the lover’s desire to eternalize their love: “till death do us part.” It gains a permanence it didn’t have before. The modern attack on marriage is not deference given to love and its free expression. Instead, it’s an insult to love. As G.K. Chesterton brilliantly put it:

“[The opponents of marriage] appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—‘free-love’—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.”

Our ability to commit ourselves to a certain future, to “make an appointment with ourselves,” as Chesterton puts it, sets us apart from the animals. In his book “Nostalgia,” Anthony Esolen wrote “dogs breed, but human beings marry. Theirs is a promise not for a long time, but forever.” Humans rationally choose to make the love we feel now into a thing of permanent value by means of commitment.

But if we let the age-old institution of marriage collapse, we are succumbing to a more animal-like state, in which the pleasures and gratifications of the moment outweigh all considerations of the future, in which we refuse to stake our future on one person. Chesterton believed that our hesitancy about making vows, especially marriage vows, stemmed from a fear of ourselves and our own inconstancy. “[I]n modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind,” he wrote.

It’s an understandable fear. We are changeable. But for many, the weight of a vow is enough to curb that fickle nature. The choice to make a commitment has always carried with it the risk of failure. Entering a marriage takes courage. Maybe what we need is a little more courage to take that risk and to see marriage as a sail that carries us across the seas of life, rather than a chain that holds us back.