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Life Ways Marriage
"We don’t need a piece of paper to prove our commitment to one another." Is that what marriage is—only a "piece of paper"? In the course of the counseling I occasionally do, I am sometimes confronted with an individual who is "living with someone" and yet wants to lead a good Catholic life. There is not much one can say in such a situation that the person one is counseling will happily accept. Nonetheless, this conflict situation does give rise to a deeper awareness of the crucial difference between marriage and merely living together. Such people I have counseled often say to me: "But we are doing everything married people do, except we don’t have the ‘piece of paper.’ ‘We love each other, are faithful and committed to each other. We don’t feel we need a piece of paper to justify our life together, either to you or anyone else." In this way, they try to create the impression that there must be something wrong with married people since they are willing to make a fetish out of a piece of paper. It is the cohabitants who are the bold, true lovers. Married partners are assumed to behave somewhat hypocritically. One must be very careful not to criticize another’s feelings. Feelings can be (and often are) immediate, intense, and very personal. People frequently grant them veridical status by equating them with reality. The counselor must not negate these feelings but try to explain what is missing—that is, the additional realities that are not the immediate objects of one’s feelings. There are realities that are part of marriage that may not be particularly immediate, intense, or personal. And this is precisely where the Church provides needed wisdom. The trouble with the view of people who are living together is that they cannot seem to get beyond "each other." Marriage is a transcendent reality that includes the past, the future, God, and society. These realities might escape the attention of two people who are absorbed by each other. As Pope John Paul II states in his encyclical On Social Concern, " The transcendent reality of the human being…is seen to be shared from the beginning by a couple, a man and a woman (see Genesis 1:27), and is therefore fundamentally social." The Church does not identify marriage with sex, although there is no doubt that the physical relationship between man and woman constitutes an essential part of marriage. The Church teaches that marriage has incomparably greater scope than a live-in sexual alliance. Marriage, indeed, is an "institution." By identifying marriage as an institution, however, the Church does not have anything in mind that could be associated with the impersonal bureaucracies of government or business. Rather it speaks of "institution" as something instituted and established in accordance with a concept of justice. How can a man and woman in a sexual relationship be truly just to one another? How can they avoid exploiting each other, sexually or otherwise? How can they play a role in the larger community, in the context of their family traditions? How can they adequately provide for their children? How can they realize marriage as a two-in-one-flesh unity that is an image of God? Is a living-together relationship sufficient to provide them with the broad framework they need in order to fulfill all these marital responsibilities? Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) makes the following remark in his chapter on marriage in Love and Responsibility: "If a person can never in any circumstances be a mere object of enjoyment for another person, but can only be the object (or rather the co-object) of love, the union of man and woman needs a suitable framework, one which permits the full development of the sexual relationship while ensuring the durability of their union" (Love and Responsibility, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, NY, 1981, p.211). He goes on to point out that in those incomparably more precarious relationships that exist between the sexes apart from marriage, it is the woman in particular who is in danger of becoming a mere object of enjoyment for the man. Marriage is a unity between the spouses. But it is a special kind of unity—an "open unity"—that is open to others: to life, family, community, society, and God. Without these additional realities, a live-together relationship tends to collapse on itself and become mutually exploitive. This is why justice demands that marriage be an institution which offers the spouses the breadth and assistance they need in order to fulfill their roles as husband and wife. Marriage is both an interpersonal as well as a social concern. Moreover, the family, which is a natural outgrowth of marriage, is the basic unit of society. This larger, more fruitful picture of marriage may have great appeal to people who are living together. They may admire it and seek to make it their own. Yet they often believe that it is a simple matter to add these larger dimensions of marriage whenever it is practical or expedient for them to do so. Therefore, they anticipate an easy transition from a living-together arrangement to a sacramental marriage in the Church. This attitude, unfortunately, represents a dangerous illusion. Marriage is an inviolable, undecomposable unity. It is not a series of layers that can be added to each other one-by-one over the course of time. For those couples who are living together and want a Church wedding, it would be wise for them to practice their deep respect for a true marriage by having an engagement period in which they abstain from sexual relationships. In this way, they can properly prepare for marriage by honoring its inviolable integrity in a practical way. They should prepare themselves for the wholeness during their engagement period. They must understand both the dignity and difficulties of marriage. In other words, they must prepare for all of marriage and not try to reduce it to a kind of staircase which they intend to climb in accordance with the convenience of the moment. Many newlyweds intend to use contraception until they build their nest egg. Some persist in deferring the fullness of marriage indefinitely. Marriage is, in a sense, like the priesthood. One cannot either be a spouse or a priest in stages (there is no such thing as a trial priesthood). A person can be a good spouse or a good priest only when he or she is prepared to assume all the obligations of one’s vocation: the difficulties as well as the attractions, the heartaches as well as the enticements. People prepare for these vocations, therefore, not by shaping and reducing them to suit their needs at the moment, but by preparing themselves to be worthy of what marriage or the priesthood entail as a whole. We best honor God’s gifts by accepting them for nothing less than what they are. In this way we also derive their greatest benefits. In so preparing for marriage, husband and wives will be just not only to each other but also to God. For related reading, check out this book
for young adults:
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