Giving and not Counting the Cost

Priest (or deacon): Since it is your intention to enter into marriage, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church.

Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Priest (or deacon): You have declared your consent before the Church. May the Lord in his goodness strnghen your consent and fill you both with his blessings. What God has joined, men must not divide.

Congregation: Amen.

Groom (placing the wedding ring on his wife's ring finger): (Name), take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Bride (placing the wedding ring on her husband's ring finger): (Name), take this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

-Rite of Marriage

With these words, a man and a woman commit themselves together, for life, in the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. A bond that is formed out of love for one another and a bond that is unbreakable in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, in the eyes of today’s present society, a couple can “fall out of love”, obstacles may arise that neither party was ready for, or many other unexpected things. And when everything starts to fall apart, it’s acceptable to give up, get a lawyer, and pretend nothing ever happened. But this isn’t Marriage. Marriage is for life. Marriage is for the “good times and in bad”, and for keeps.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics (a branch of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the divorce rate in the United States alone was 53% in 2010. This statistic should cause a cold chill to run down the spines of all Americans. 53% of American marriages end in divorce. (CDC)  Something has to be done. Most of these good-willed people have entered into this bond (some sacramentally) out of love for one another, what is driving them apart? Whatever it may be, the couple needs to back up, re-examine the vows they took, find in those words the love that they had for one another, and re-commit themselves to the love they shared when they entered into this unbreakable bond. This is the simple, yet complex, remedy for the situation we face.
Imagine a couple, newly wed, moving into their home for the very first time…their wedding night. Mister and Missus are filled with the new excitement, knowing they can finally live together in complete love. They have a very romantic evening planned and will be leaving for the honeymoon in a couple of days. Is this not one of the most beautiful sights the world has to offer? Committed to God, committed to the community, and committed to one another this man and woman begin their life together. But the honeymoon ends and soon the once sparkling idea begins to tarnish. What happened? This question has a very simple answer; life happened.
Examine the poem Those Winter Sundays, by Robert Hayden. The story goes something like this; a father wakes up before dawn to a cold house, wrestles with his clothes, and stirs up the fire so that his kids can have a warm house to wake up to. Soon the son wakes up…slowly, taking pauses at every available opportunity. He goes into the main room and finds his good shoes polished and shined. (Hayden) The father in the story has it pretty rough, there seems to be tension in the house, he works all day, and it seems the son is ungrateful. But he keeps going, but why? The father keeps going out of love; he realizes that no matter how hard life can get for him, he wants his kids to have the very best in life, so he does his very best to give them what he can.
Perhaps the best summary of love gone un-noticed is this section from Barbara Kingsolver’s Stone Soup:

I started out like any child, intent on being the Family of Dolls. I set upon young womanhood believing in most of the doctrines of my generation: I wore my skirts four inches above the knee. I had that Barbie with her zebra-striped swimsuit and a figure unlike anything found in nature. And I understood the Prince Charming Theory of Marriage, a quest for Mr. Right that ends smack dab where you find him. I did not completely understand that another whole story begins there, and no fairy tale prepared me for the combination of bad luck and persistent hope that would interrupt my dream and lead me to other arrangements.
Like a cancer diagnosis, a dying marriage is a thing to fight, to deny, and finally, when there's no choice left, to dig in and survive. Casseroles would help. Likewise, I imagine it must be a painful reckoning in adolescence (or later on) to realize true love will never look like the soft-focus fragrance ads because Prince Charming (surprise!) is a princess. Or vice versa. Or has skin the color your parents didn't want you messing with, except in the Crayola box.
It's awfully easy to hold in contempt the straw broken home, and that mythical category of persons who toss away nuclear family for the sheer fun of it. Even the legal terms we use have a suggestion of caprice. I resent the phrase "irreconcilable differences," which suggests a stubborn refusal to accept a spouse's little quirks. This is specious. Every happily married couple I know has loads of irreconcilable differences. Negotiating where to set the thermostat is not the point. A nonfunctioning marriage is a slow asphyxiation. It is waking up despised each morning, listening to the pulse of your own loneliness before the radio begins to blare its raucous gospel that you're nothing if you aren't loved. It is sharing your airless house with the threat of suicide or other kinds of violence, while the ghost that whispers, "Leave here and destroy your children," has passed over every door and nailed it shut. Disassembling a marriage in these circumstances is as much fun as amputating your own gangrenous leg. You do it, if you can, to save a life--or two, or more. (Kingsolver)

If life could get any sadder than what is described in these three paragraphs, it must not be livable. Waking up every morning alone, hated, or feeling worthless is probably the worst feeling in the world. One could compare this to the night and morning after a bad break up, one that the hurt is so deep that you literally spend every second you have by yourself mourning the lost possibilities, lost love, and seems worse than a lost life. But if we apply this to a marriage sort of relationship the cause of the feelings of loneliness and worthlessness would have to come from some sort of fight or neglect. Is a married couple really going to let that stand in the way of their love that they have for each other? Kingsolver says, “Disassembling a marriage in these circumstances is as much fun as amputating your own gangrenous leg. You do it if you can, to save a life—or two, or more.” Is it really saving a life though? Are we, as a society, really going to discount love that quickly? Unfortunately we are, but it needs to stop. If a couple wants to quit a marriage because of a stupid fight, a bunch of shouted words that go back and forth, forget any awesome memories, kids, self-fulfillment for both partners…then it would be better if the couple had not entered into this deep of a commitment.
The main reason all of this happens is the closed communication between couples. If couples were completely open with each other from the get-go, it would not be impossible for the national divorce rate to come down. Most fights would cease, not all, but most. But we, as a society need to step back and examine our priorities when it comes to relationships. If someone enters into a relationship with another human being, only seeking to gain personal pleasure or wealth, they need to get out of that relationship. That person is using their significant other. They are, in a sense, treating the other person like an object…an object that is meant to serve them and bow to their every will. That is not what a relationship is, and in the larger scope of things, it is not what marriage is. The perfect analogy would be the whole idea of Making Love, the marital act that continues to call a couple back to the first time they were together in that capacity, the act that reminds them of the love they share for one another. In today’s society, we see Making Love as involving two people…but it involves three. First the Man, who seeks the good of his wife, seeking to fulfill her the best he can. The second player is the Wife, who seeks the good of her husband, seeking to fulfill him the best she can. The third, and often forgotten player in this truly divine act, is God. Yes the man and woman fulfill each other, but society can sometimes forget that we, as humans, are supposed to serve and glorify God in every way we can. Is there a more perfect time to praise the Lord, than when a man and his wife become one flesh? No, because in that instance we take part in something of which it’s incredible beauty is not of this world.
Love in a sense is an emotion, one of the most powerful God has given us. But Love is a person, God. A marriage must be founded on God, because He is the fullest Love imaginable. Love and praise God through your spouse, be led by the spirit to your partner’s arms, and when you arrive there, thank God for His loving embrace embodied at this moment by the arms of your lover.

The Reality of the Sexes

Throughout the ages men and women have engaged in different roles in the workplace, church, and home. But has anyone truly stopped to think about the roles of both men and women at play in the intimacy of a relationship? Are women being oppressed by their male counterpart? Or is there a possibility that society has turned a pitiful eye toward women and made them the victim of these powerful, lustful, ungrateful men?
Traditionally, a relationship has two roles, one role is submissive and the other is dominant.  But what role does each partner take? And what roles would foster a loving and lasting relationship between man and woman? As it stands now in the current culture, women have the most power in more serious relationships. However, it should be a balanced power system shared between man and woman.
According to the essay Independent Women (and Other Lies) by Katie Roiphe, a woman looks for a man who will take care of her. The traditional man who, with his big strong arms, will protect her from the outside world. This man will be hard as steel on the outside, but will treat her with the utmost respect, dignity, and sweetness. (Roiphe) Coming from the world that tells her that women are supposed to remain female in sex, but masculine in gender, she sees the flaws within this line of thinking. No matter how she sliced it, she could not shake the inner most need for protection. The question that is posed by the essay amounts to, “Is this woman being submissive, even to the point of losing her identity?” Upon reflection, one may discover that the weakness presented in the essay is not necessarily weakness at all, in fact, it is a unique source of power women have. They notice that they are in need, just as the men are, so a woman would use this need and pair it with the man’s needs (which are very similar) and they complete each other.
Return to this idea of being “masculine in gender and female in sex”. A woman may be a female by her sex (the physical aspects of her body) but she may be masculine in gender (the way she positions herself in the culture). So a girl who enjoys hunting, over-competitiveness, and other things generally associated with men, would be labeled as a masculine female. It could also work the other way around. Men can sometimes get caught up in clothes shopping, getting manicures, and other feminine activities, and he would be labeled a feminine male.
Returning, now, to the relationship previously discussed, one partner is supposed to complete the other. Why is it that one is considered submissive? It does not have to be that way. A recent study done by the Pew Research Center, men and women seem to be working side-by-side when it comes to decision making within a relationship. However, there are some people who prefer to be dominant, or be dominated, and most times the ones who dominate are women. The researchers asked four different questions: 1) Who decides what you do together on the weekend? 2) Who makes decisions on big purchases for the home? 3) Who most often decides what to watch on television? 4) Who manages the household finances?
The results of the first questions came back as 16% of the couples said men make the weekend plans but 28% of them said its decided by women. The second question seemed to yield nearly the same results, 19% of the couples said men decided the big purchases, but 30% of couples said the women did the big shopping. Third question (probably the most argued in today’s society), what to watch on television was decided by men in 26% of the couples and by women in 27% of the couples. Finally the fourth question, 41% of the men deal with the finances and 26% of the women, quite a noticeable difference. (Pew Social Demographic Trends RSS) If the study ended there, it would be a very depressing reality that many of our current couples are dominated by one party.
However that is not where it stops. The researchers also asked the couples if they worked together to make those decisions. In question one, 46% of couples made plans together. Question two pertaining to the big purchases, 46% of couples worked together. Question three and four, however, stayed around the 27% mark. Why is that? It’s because these people realize that a healthy relationship is based upon mutual communication. (Pew Social Demographic Trends RSS)
Deborah Tannen, author of Sex, Lies, and Conversation, suggests that communication is different between men and women, but it is incredibly important to bridge that gap for the good of the relationship. (Tannen) If a man and a woman attempt to go through a relationship, each only seeking their own ends, it would be better if the bond between them never existed. Instead, each party in the relationship must reach out to the other and remember that it is their relationship too. The bond is effecting their life as well.
However, couples often set up false identities for one another. Perhaps the best possible example of this idea is the story An Ounce of Cure which tells the story of a young girl who chases after a typical high school fantasy. But like all relationships based on fantasies, it falls through. Like most high school break ups, it is over exaggerated and she attempts to kill herself (while babysitting a couple’s kids). Yet, her friends come to the rescue and basically save her life. The friends arrive to find the girl completely drunk out of her mind and barely conscious. But they nurse her back to heath and, what a surprise, her life goes on. The boy however, who turned out to be a band geek, rather than truly Wil, grows up and becomes a Funeral Director. (Munro)
When a couple starts out based solely on physical attraction and fantasies the relationship may seem romantic and a dream come true for both parties. But that is just it; it is a dream. Neither party in the relationship will be able to bond, and soon it will fall apart. There has to be a deeper intimacy than that of bodies, it has to be an intimacy of the soul. Then the couple can then address what color they want the kitchen painted.
For most people, the Bible stands as a judge over beliefs and moral mindsets. So what does the Bible say about relationships? Let’s examine the Letter to the Ephesians:

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church,30because we are members of his body.
“For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  (Eph 5:21-31)

This passage is one of the more controversial passages in the New Testament letters, but it clearly defines a relationship. A woman should be submissive to her husband. However, it goes on to say that Husbands must love their wives and treat them as equals. So perhaps it is not that one party is supposed to be dominant and the other submissive, rather it is humility that creates equality within a relationship. A woman must be submissive, and the man is not to take advantage of that; a man must love, and the woman must not take advantage of that. However, they will hold each other to a certain standard in love and humility and continue to walk through this crazy journey of life together in safety. Therefore there is no dominant party, there is no submissive party. A true fruitful relationship is one based on love and humility, desiring only the ultimate good for the other person. No one partner is greater than the other in a relationship. The two people must learn to cease being separate, dominate, and submissive; they must become one.
Perhaps the role of women is changing, based on the study done by the Pew Research Center women make the majority of the decisions in the home (when it is a one sided relationship). However, there is another important aspect to the Pew Study; if a relationship is based on the principles described in the passage from the Letter to the Ephesians, the majority of the couples responded that they make choices together, as one. Maybe this kind of maturity comes with age, but at some point in life it must kick in. Knowing that a body has only one head, and would be unable to function with two, the two separate people must learn to become one and live each day for the good of the other person.