"Marriage is a great institution - if you want to live in an institution."
Wry humor has a prominent place in any marriage, and it's usually shared by both sides. My wife gave me a card for our 34th anniversary. It read:
"For the One I Love
The moment I saw you
I knew we'd fall desperately in love,
Get married, have kids...
And drive each other crazy for the rest of our lives."
So it goes, as it has to go, when independent people commit to life together. Sharp edges are smoothed and each bends to make life manageable; sometimes you change, sometimes your spouse does. But shared core values remain. Love endures, and even grows, through shared triumphs, tragedies, successes and failures.
A solid platform for bearing and raising children develops and as the kids come into your lives you both learn what unconditional love is. It's in your heart the second they take their first breaths and it never stops. Each parent contributes to child rearing and teaches lessons, providing a well-rounded, supportive upbringing. Then one day they're off, hopefully to provide the next generation with the same support.
At least that's what we aspire to. Christianity promotes these values and plenty of studies have shown that fatherless, single-parent, often poverty-stricken homes are detrimental to the kids.
The Republican in Springfield, MA sometimes runs strories about people locked in bad situations. The most recent piece was typical. An unwed mother and her two-year-old son were housed in a motel room funded by the state. She wants to get a GED, job training and off the dole. As reporter Nancy Gonter notes, "Life hasn't been easy." The 24-year-old has "had six children already; three daughters live with her mother and two sons have been adopted by other families." No mention of a husband, much less the financial and emotional support one would provide.
Vincent J. Cannata reviewed Freedom Is Not Enough by James T. Patterson in The Wall Street Journal. He notes that in 1965 a yet-to-be-famous Daniel Patrick Moynihan controversially warned about the poverty and "tangle of pathologies" caused by bearing children out of wedlock. He was alarmed by the 25% of black children in that category. By 2008 the rates were white 28%, Hispanic 52% and black 72%.
The ramifications for kids are huge. Nutrition, sleeping habits and routines suffer, not to mention a lesser interaction with good role models. Education is hurt: politicians think throwing money at schools will solve the problem, but it won't. If students don't have support, discipline and motivation from parents it doesn't matter how many computers the schools have. Worse, it's easier for them to fall in with the wrong people. Locally the police have been chasing gang recruiters off shool grounds at dismissal time.
Despite its difficulty, marriage is valued and promoted in Christianity. It glues successful societies together, but it's being jettisoned by our culture with little concern about the practical consequences.
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Amen! Wonderful assessment of life as it really is. I loved the card. That confirms my opinion that you MUST marry a person with a good sense of humor.
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