Along the same lines as the advice about loving many things together and looking forward in the same direction, a friend posted this quote attributed to Dr. Seuss (saying essentially the same thing, because it seems to be the best advice out there):

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

A little goofy, but there you go. I think sometimes I’ve heard it end more like “we fall into mutually satisfying weirdness” which makes a bit more sense, if you have to talk about it this way, I guess. I think it is a heartening sentiment. Go be a little weird with someone and appreciate that God gave you someone to be a little weird with!

It is important to choose a spouse who can be your partner, and too many people miss that fact these days (that’s why they aren’t finding spouses, and why divorce rates are so high). But it is also important to choose someone who will be the parent you want for your children.

As to the first criterion: I recently heard a young man say to his best and closest friend (a young woman), on the way home from an event at a church: “If I marry someone else, will you still do things like this with me and be my partner in trying to change the culture?”

Her answer, obviously, is “no”—of course she won’t. He only gets one partner. Just one. We all only get one.

It’s a self-deconstructing question. If he can even ask it like that, he ought to know that he has found the person he should marry. Without doubt. Especially because, as far as I can tell by watching the people around me, the best and perhaps only way to change the culture is for people like those two to marry each other and then tell everyone why they did and what it is like.

As to the second criterion: Several months ago, I was chatting with my priest, and he recounted a thought he had upon first seeing his wife holding their newborn son. He looked at her, thought of his son, and realized that his son’s well-being and upbringing were almost entirely in her hands. He was very glad to have chosen a wife who would be the sort of mother he wanted for his children, because the responsibility was hers. Apart from her genetic contributions (such as intelligence and personality), she would have an enormous role to play in the formation of their children.

Men, your wife will raise your children: They will learn their grammar from her. She will be the one answering their questions about life, the world, and God. What will she answer? How will she answer? Schools and churches can’t compete with mothers. A hundred years ago the argument was made that women should be educated, especially in civics, so that they could raise well-informed critical thinkers who would be good citizens. I’m not sure that everyone benefits from education the same way, but for a certain segment of the population, I expect this could be pretty important.

Working mothers will hand their children to someone else for large parts of their lives, so that’s a bit different. On the other hand, it may be worth asking whether mothers should work. I have a sister in research science, which is obviously not an easy discipline to dovetail with child-rearing. My mother supposes that women in those situations often put off having children until after they get their degree, or else they may have just one until later, etc. (Not every family wants lots of kids, and that’s fine.) My mother worked, and we spent the day with a nanny, a widow in her sixties.

But my mother remarks often that she felt incredibly lucky to have found for us a nanny like the one we had: it wasn’t a daycare—it was one person acting as a parent to us, as a family, in our own home. And she was intelligent. My mother said that they talked about how my parents wanted us raised, disciplined, educated, and our nanny did her best to raise us according to our parents wishes. She wasn’t babysitting, she was parenting. I can tell you that a lot of my development must be credited to her. She encouraged creativity and discussion. She taught us history and respect for family in the stories she told us about her own family. She took us out to learn about our city and about nature (She taught us to collect clay from creek beds).

It is because I can see so clearly her influence that I know my priest is right about the impact a mother has. Even in households with stay-at-home fathers, women report spending more hours per week parenting than men. My own working mother thought of herself as a housewife (as much as or more than she thought of herself as a physician), and tells us that being our mother was a second full-time job for her.

Your children are in the hands of your wife. In a sense, this is nothing more than one aspect of the partnership of marriage: a unified vision—a life built together. As someone put it to me last week: “I think feminism has made it so that people think finding someone to marry is supposed to be, like, really mysterious or something. But it isn’t!” The standards should be high. But they also should be the right standards. As with that fellow up above, it isn’t actually hard to recognize the person you should marry, if you know what you ought to be looking for.