In a few days, I’ll stand beside wonderful friends and conduct their wedding. Our family has known the bride and her family since she was 4 years old. We’ve watched her grow up and mature into a beautiful, confident, thoughtful woman of substance and of faith. And now she has discovered and fallen in love with her soul mate. We’re thrilled for them. So, joining them in marriage will be one of the best tasks I undertake—not just this year, but my entire life.
My perspective apparently defies conventional wisdom. This week, we’re publishing a package of articles on marriage, and one of them reveals some dismal statistics:
• Divorce has more than doubled since the 1960s, and that pace has slowed only because more unmarried couples are living together.
• Four in 10 U.S. babies are born to unwed mothers.
• Married couples now comprise the minority in America—only 48 percent of households.
• Moreover, a Pew Research Center/Time magazine poll shows almost 40 percent of Americans believe marriage is obsolete.
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Still, I’m delighted to join our young friends as they celebrate their marriage. Research from across at least two decades confirms the blessing this marriage will provide, particularly if it produces children and this couple remains together to raise them. The sons will be less inclined toward violence and much less likely to go to jail, and the daughters will be less inclined toward promiscuity and much less likely to bear children out of wedlock. That’s only part of it. Research also shows children raised by their parents are safer and, on the whole, perform better in school. (This takes nothing away from the many single parents who are doing an exemplary job raising children, often under difficult circumstances. It simply attests to the fact most children benefit from the intact marriages of their parents.)
But marriage isn’t simply about the kids. Scripture, history and human experience all point toward God’s design. “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.’ … For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:18, 24). From the very beginning, women and men have needed—yearned for—the deep, intimate sense of knowing and being known only marriage offers.
When I was younger, I?always thought the reference to “one flesh” was all about sex. Maybe that was because, for young men, practically everything is about sex. And to be sure, biblical scholarship validates the place of sexual relations and procreation as central to marriage.
But the longer I am married, the more I realize “one flesh” far transcends sexuality. As a matter of fact, if sex were the qualifier for “one flesh,” then rampant promiscuity has produced a race of mutants, whose aberrant oneness intermingles among multitudes. No, ideal oneness reflects a unity only attainable when two people so closely identify with each other they realize they are incomplete when they stand alone.
This is tricky, because all people are individuals created in God’s image, and the singular self never should be subsumed beneath another. Dominance—sometimes disguised as biblical hierarchy—produces dysfunction.
But we live in a society too quick to promote the individual. We would be healthier and our marriages would be stronger if we sought to define and derive marital identity as a couple. Describing a healthy marriage is as challenging as explaining the Trinity, the eternal Three-in-Oneness. A strong marriage brings together two vital individuals who still possess personal will and selfhood but who are not completely identified or understood without the other. The only way a marriage—any marriage—can endure the strains and challenges of life is by achieving integrated identity that refuses to see the one as completely separate from the other and prefers the spouse to the self. If Christians modeled marriages like this, perhaps the perception of matrimony would improve.
Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard. Visit his blog at www.baptiststandard.com.
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