Marriage in Culture

The general response I received when Heidi and I announced our engagement last year was very interesting.  Most people sought to temper my natural excitement with some measure of realism.  “It will be good, but it will be hard.”  “Marriage isn’t just happily-ever-after.”  The second most common response was pure cynicism.  “Well good luck with that one!”  “Hopefully your marriage will last a few years longer than mine... haha”  Out of so many responses, I had only two men share personally from the other end of the spectrum. “Getting married is the best thing I’ve ever done,” said one husband and father.  Another friend said, “I know you have lots of high expectations going into marriage, but after a couple years you will realize that it will actually be better than your expectations!”  These two stuck out to me because you never hear statements like these, particularly from men.  Perhaps it’s worth asking the question, why?

I mean besides America having the highest divorce rates in the world and therefore lots of first-hand experience with marital destruction, there is also, in addition, a well-entrenched culture of avoidance and bemoaning toward marriage.  My wife told me a story of an older couple asked to publicly share their marital advice to some newlyweds on their wedding day.  The husband got up and said to the groom “Run.  Run Away.”  Besides how ugly and tactless it was, a man would never say that publicly unless there was already a deep culture of collective cynicism --a culture more likely to laugh at such a public ridicule of his wife, rather than rebuke him. 

Maybe we can start to answer the question by jumping off Stuart Coupland’s observations.  He says we live in an ‘extended adolescent’ culture.  It is a culture most characterized by a deep disinclination to long term commitments and responsibility.  It is a video-game, fast-food, culture of instant gratification. A lot could be said in response to this, but I guess I just wonder how seeing your autistic son graduate college, or your life’s work being manufactured on the global market, or reconciling with your estranged brother in heartfelt tears, etc. --I wonder how these could ever be in the same ballpark as hedonistic bodily pleasures (what Aristotle called the pleasures of swine).  But for our 'extended adolescent' culture, instant gratification is not just on the same playing field, it almost always holds the trump card!

I guess I would just echo to our generation what Lewis told his.  Ironically the problem is not that our desires are too strong, but too weak.  “We are far too easily pleased.  We are like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea,” (Weight of Glory, pg 26).  When you taste what it means to live for something bigger than your immediate sensations, than whole new worlds open.  And I suspect worlds that would have a very different way of talking about marriage than ours.