Marriage: Don't Do It Alone

The other day I told a buddy that I think we need to take everything we were taught about marriage and run it through the wood chipper. He agreed and added, “As long as we can douse it in jet fuel and light it first.”

You might say he’s going through some tough times, too. 

It’s everywhere. I mean everywhere. Honestly, I wish I didn’t know so much about people’s marriage and struggles - if not for this literally God-given strength, endurance, optimism and positive freakin’ vibes, it would be utterly demoralizing. I’d write off the institution as a huge con. 

It appears that most of the secular western world has already written it off. You know the statistics - half or more of marriages end in divorce, and subsequent marriages have radically higher failure rates. Most children are born out of wedlock. Open marriages, affairs, or experimental multi-partner “throuples” are everywhere. 

I’m part of a few dads’ and mens’ groups online. Most of them are faith-neutral. I joined one of them when it was at about 40k members. Less than a month later it was at 51k. This group had been around for years, but suddenly it was flooded with fathers and husbands in some relationship crisis or another. Most are newly separated, divorced, or are about to be. 

Of the most vocal among them, maybe half actually got married. From a traditional point of view, it’s no mystery why they’re running into trouble now - their relationships began with random hook-ups and/or surprise and unwanted pregnancies. Many of them compounded dumb decisions with shacking up or getting “a piece of paper” down at the courthouse. 

Roughly 90 percent of the posts on one forum (which is theoretically for fathers about how to be better fathers, by the way) start with some variation of, “I’m shell-shocked. My wife of five years told me she didn’t love me anymore and filed for divorce. She left me with our one child and already has a new boyfriend.”

It’s not much better in the Christian world, even in my sort of hyper-tribal tradition. Protestants seem to have pretty much gone the way of the world on marriage long ago (you might even argue that Protestantism is a result of embracing the world’s view of marriage). Catholics have “annulments,” which seem easier to obtain than entrance into Arizona State. The Orthodox? I see the suffering everywhere. 

Here’s what threatens to radicalize me on the topic: the vast majority of the men I know are good, solid, and well-intentioned. They’re not just trying to hold it together with some scraps of chivalric duty they read about - they’re actively engaged in living the good, true, and beautiful. Even the guys who came from a solid home with a present father. They’re abundant providers, and they’re intentional about giving time to their wives and children. Most of them seem to give completely of themselves while taking volley after volley of arrows from the world - and from their own families. In my world, the men I know take seriously the idea that we must “die to ourselves,” or, in the east, the “mutual martyrdom” of marriage. 

And yet… And yet, so many seem to be hanging on by a thread because it’s just never enough…