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      3. Watch television dramas and sitcoms and lots of romantic-comedy movies to get an idea of what you’re in for when you get married.

      4. If your marriage is mediocre, you must get out of your marriage if you happen one day to meet that one person you were destined for.

      5. Beauty generally determines the quality of the marriage: ugly people have ugly marriages, ordinary people have ordinary marriages, gorgeous people have gorgeous marriages, and movie stars have movie-star marriages.

      6. For marriage to be blissful, a wife must be thin, busty, sweet, beautiful, and nubile. A husband can be anything—ugly, hairy, smelly, fat, annoying, and rude—just as long as he is wealthy, witty, occasionally sweet, and “good in bed.”

      7. Marriage is only one option, no better or worse than living together with your partner or having casual sex on a regular basis; but, should you choose to get married:

      8. You must live together before you get married.

      9. “Fidelity” has to do with stereo equipment.

      10. Lasting romance and lots of sex are the essential ingredients that will keep your marriage alive.

      11. Love has reasonable conditions and limits, much like your relationship with your auto mechanic: as long as you get what you want and the price is not too high, it doesn’t hurt to stick with what you’ve got.

      12. If you aren’t having passionate, life-changing sex every time you’re in bed together, something is wrong with the relationship, i.e. you probably married the wrong person, and you should consider getting a divorce.

      13. When the romance is gone, so is the marriage, and you should get a divorce.

      14. Marriage is supposed to satisfy your needs. It should not inhibit you from achieving your goals for your education, your career ambitions, and being all that you are meant to be, and if it ever does, you should get a divorce.

      15. Prolonged, difficult, unresolved differences are best solved with a divorce.

      16. Your first marriage can be considered a “starter marriage,” a learning experience, and you should expect to get divorced at least once.

      I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are

       and what we are doing and what we ought to do.

      —Marilynne Robinson,

       The Death of Adam

      Introduction

      Marriage

      and

      Consumer Culture

      Unlike a lot of books, a new book on marriage seems to require a raison d’être, some justification for adding yet another volume to the jam-packed-and-growing “Relationships” section in the bookstore. Mine is this: on the whole, marriage is taking a beating, and I want to defend it.

      Very nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, and Christian marriages are no exception. I’ve seen the statistic cited so frequently that it doesn’t surprise me anymore, and yet every time I hear of another friend whose marriage has fallen apart, even if I’m not surprised, the truth always hits me like a painful blow. Marriage is intimate, and marriage is hard, damn hard. And our culture offers couples no meaningful encouragement to stay together through all the surprising, painful challenges they run into, the inevitable (and necessary) harsh realities of marriage. There are plenty of experts with plenty of advice, but not very many men and women seem willing to speak honestly about difficulties of married life, and journey alongside all of us non-experts.

      It’s easy to cite the usual explanations for our culture’s rising divorce rate: a legal system that makes divorce easy and accessible, the rise of premarital cohabitation, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions, the seductive promises of sexual freedom in an increasingly promiscuous society. But I suspect that behind the widespread disintegration of marriage lies a deep crisis of meaning, a fundamental problem with our collective stories. Despite the postmodern undermining of the overarching metanarratives that have shaped and defined Western culture over the last five hundred years, we are still inheritors of stories great and small that help us locate ourselves individually and as a society. Whether we are always conscious of it or not, our culture tells stories that say where we’ve come from, who we are, and where we’re going. And, as the postmodern critics have made abundantly clear, those stories have profound, far-reaching consequences for how we live.

      The Christian wedding ritual celebrates marriage as a gift from God. Every Christian wedding ceremony has its roots in Genesis, where Adam and Eve are brought together by God to love one another, work together, and make a family. I take it on faith that marriage is still a gift, a distant descendant of that first couple, but it’s not a blind faith: in the ongoing presence of my wife, I am reminded daily that marriage is a gift, the most beautiful, healing, transformative experience I have ever been given. It’s better than I could have come up with on my own.

      And harder, too. No doubt Adam and Eve’s years together would have led to the usual unglamorous moments of everyday married life that all of us still face: drawn-out fights about little things and agonizing fights about big things, boredom, the temptation to break vows, the struggle to communicate openly, the challenges of sexual fidelity, disagreements over how to raise the kids, power struggles, hiding from intimacy, the ongoing effort to offer forgiveness and grace. Love isn’t easy. No doubt the ongoing dynamics of even the best marriages include plenty of hard times, but marriage has always been that way, and it always will be. Marriage isn’t meant to be easy; it’s meant to be good. Marriage was God’s idea from the start, and every marriage since Eden is an ongoing participation in God’s original idea of marriage, a lifelong covenantal union characterized by active, engaged love, underwritten by grace, and charged with mystery.

      Somewhere along the way in my early religious instruction, I got the impression that nothing good survived the cataclysmic fall of Genesis 3. Although things here on this earth might sometimes seem good, these could only be temptations of my sinful flesh or deceptions that the devil throws my way to distract me from the true eternal glory that I will only know when I reach heaven, Amen. But I’m no longer convinced of the “total depravity” of creation. What makes more sense to me is that the original goodness that God created in the Garden of Eden has survived the fall. In Genesis, we see the goodness of creation and we also see how sin entered the world, and from that point on through to the end of Revelation we get an ongoing description of how creation is the battleground for the cosmic war between God and evil. It doesn’t say that when the sin came in, God packed up all that was good and put it away in a long-term, post-mortem celestial storage facility called Heaven. In Genesis, God pauses at the end of every day of creation to admire his work, and he can’t seem to contain himself. Creation isn’t good because God declares it so; God is making observations: “That crab apple tree is a fine piece of work, and that field of Ladyslippers is breathtaking. I really like those pronghorn antelope. Wow, that thunderstorm rumbling across that prairie landscape is breathtaking. And that man and woman down there falling in love—naïve, blissful, drunk on love—that’s just what I had in mind, that’s just right.” His excitement is obvious: “Good, good,” he says, over and over again, and when he gets to the end and makes man and woman, falling in love, he says, “Very good,” and takes a day off to rest and enjoy it all. God is the one who first says, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and all of us ever since have felt the truth of that right down to our bones. From the very beginning we are truly made for one another. That longing for love is no illusion or deception; it’s how we are meant to be.

      I think we’re in a period of deep confusion about what marriage is because we’re confused about what love is. There’s a lot of talk in Christian circles about our culture’s view of things like sexuality, identity, gender roles, traditional values, and what legally constitutes a marriage, but I think some of our moralizing overlooks our deep misunderstanding of covenantal love, which is fundamental to marriage. Our confusion about the reality of love is largely due to the fact that covenantal love is in direct competition with the ubiquitous, seductive myths of consumer

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