A status update from my facebook newsfeed:

“37 years ago today I married my best friend. I love you!!!”

(See some of my previous thoughts on telling the truth about marriage here and here.)

I have had a lot of time alone recently, as my companion is absent for a while. It’s Labor Day weekend. But I am blessed to be surrounded by people who are married and have families of their own, which means I am by myself; the only person whose job it is to be with me is temporarily elsewhere.

This is what I’m thinking about today:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” … And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Women are made to be companions. Men need companions whether they know it or not. God knows it. This is saying that when you find a fitting partner, you get married. And leave your father and mother and siblings. And lead one life together with your spouse. To the extent that men these days can get away with not committing, they are harming women by denying them what they most need: the chance to be what they were made to be. Companions. Feminism, ironically, has just enabled men to harm us in this new way. They still hold the power. They can dawdle, and refuse to grow up, and act like they don’t owe anybody anything, and pretend they have years before they need to settle down. And while they refuse to marry, they keep women from being women.

We weren’t made to be alone. And meeting friends for coffee once a week doesn’t cut it. We were made to live one life together with one other person, one God made to suit us primarily as a committed friend. COMPANIONSHIP IS THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE, as far as the Bible is concerned. A partnership! That is very important. Children, notice, are NOT the reason for marriage. They are one thing marriage can give you, among many things. But the reason God gives is that is it NOT GOOD FOR THE MAN TO BE ALONE.

It is apparent that God’s observation is true. Joseph Smith [Correction: Brigham Young] is credited with saying every unmarried man over the age of 26 is a menace to society, and it is true. Thankfully, in my circle of friends, there is only one single guy left. But he is an incredibly destabilizing force in our lives! My sister, the other day, was talking about how hard it is for her circle of friends to deal with single people (she and her circle are also mostly married). She says they change they dynamic of parties. They are increasingly hard to interact with. And the older they get, the more their immaturity shows. Marriage is the only way I know of to civilize men and get them to be positive forces in the lives of those around them. It forces them to live cooperatively. It forces them to live for something other than themselves and their own hobbies.

It is a little different for girls. I think we are less destabilizing than men. But we actually notice the lack. Companionless on a holiday, a lot of people would be quick to say, “I’m sure there must be someplace you could go be a third wheel!” And that’s probably true. But it isn’t what we’re made for, which means it is likely to hurt even more than being alone for the holiday. All for the selfishness of childish men who won’t leave their mother and father and cling to the wife God has given them.

I was at an engagement party last night. Two friends of mine are getting married. They started out as just friends, and persisted that way for a long time. He knew in some sense that God had given this girl to him, but he wasn’t particularly pleased with the gift. He had other plans. He dated other girls. But eventually, he made the decision to put his own will second to God’s. And after he made that decision, he knew it was the right one. They’re really just right for each other.

I talked to her mother at the party. She said one of her other daughters has a boyfriend who remarks about her daughter that he never expected to find someone else who saw things the way he did. I said that chapter in C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves about friendship is actually the chapter that best describes the sorts of relationships that become marriages. She agreed. She and her husband, she says, were just good friends.

Do you think you are the exception to the rule? If you have a good friend, get married. Nobody who has done that regrets it. If you think God is nudging you in one direction, but your own plans pull you in another, surrender your own plans. Nobody who has done that regrets it. But you may not know that until you try it. The proof is in the pudding.

But in the mean time, look at how happy all these other people are—people who did the right thing—and take heart.

 

It’s not about you.

Love, that is. Love isn’t about you. This is possibly the most important truth that Christianity has to offer our culture’s idolatry of romantic love. So, internet world, listen up.

Someone said to me recently “we have different interests.” He said it as though it meant something. Of course we have different interests: even in a marriage, spouses have different interests. Love is the decision, the choice, to put someone else’s interests above your own. Simple! Hard to do. But simple.

Nobody deserves our love. Nobody! If this man is waiting to love someone until that love suits his own interests, he will never love anyone. He will feel physical attraction, infatuation. But that is a selfish love and nothing to do with Christian ethics.

I’ve been told it is very hard for men to understand the significance of marriage before they’re in it. Married men insist it is about companionship and friendship. Unmarried men have no idea why that matters. Having separate interests is always going to be part of the game. I’d argue that marriage is the best way humanity has to accommodate those separate interests. But “looking out for number one” is the poisonous morality of our age, and it does not lead to love.

Love isn’t about you. Love is all about others. My heart breaks to watch a friend labor over whether he should be with someone: he can’t find the confidence he needs to marry a girl, because he can’t know that it is objectively, absolutely, what he wants. But it never will be. No person can be! His love for her can’t be about him. As long as it is, he won’t find peace.

I have been there, and I wish I could tell this guy about it. I remember being paralyzed by my fear of committing to someone who is imperfect. One day, though, I realized that all my thinking was about me and my own fears and desires.

As long as we go looking for a love that fulfills us, we will find nothing but doubt and we will end up hurting the very people we should be loving. I learned it the hard way. Hopefully, dear reader, you won’t have to.

The other day I heard a story. My friend said that at a recent family gathering with his several siblings, one of his aunts said “You know, your grandfather is a really great man and he deserves to see some great-grandchildren before he dies!” The room of course is scandalized by her forwardness. Observing the shocked and uncomfortable looks on the faces of the grandchildren, the grandmother adds, “Well, she’s just saying what we’re all thinking!” That’s the punch line of the story: first, it was outrageous for the aunt to make her remark, but just when we thought it couldn’t get more awkward or inappropriate, the grandmother agrees! Surprise!

Now, I feel bad for my friend in that it must not be easy to have put off adulthood so long that people’s remarks about it have become impatient. I even understand that that can make is harder—make it feel more uncomfortable—to do the right thing. But I really think it is a great portrait of how lost our culture is that a 29-year-old can be so nonplussed when his family remarks that he ought to get on with having a family of his own.

As it happens, I heard this story right before church. The sermons at my church have sortof been all about growing up. The theme has been not limping between two opinions (God and Baal in the story) because dawdling is the same as making the wrong choice. They’ve been encouraging us to find the places in our own lives where we are just limping along, refusing to step out in faith into what we’ve been asked to do.

We were charged this past Sunday with taking our roles seriously: our roles as fathers, mothers, teachers, bosses, husbands, wives. It occurred to me as our priest listed all the roles he could think of that my friend in the seat next to me was none of them. Not a husband. Not a father. In short, not committed to anyone outside of himself. Of course he’d say he is committed to God (and that’s true and important), and that he is committed to a loving attitude toward people generally, and that he is dedicated to certain socio-political philosophies and their implementation. Maybe he would say he is committed to paying off his student loans. But none of those things are very concrete, and none of them are people. I, like my friend, am not living one of those roles. Unfortunately, being a wife and mother isn’t the sort of job we can apply for. It takes a mature man who recognizes the value he gets from committing to a woman. He has to grow up and act before we are able to do the job God has made us for.

When you are 22, you can look at a close female friend and say, “oh, we’re just friends.” If you are “just friends” with the same girl seven years later, you’ve gotten it wrong. That’s the girl you should have married. (And you can still get it right!) Because in mature adulthood, there is no such thing as “that girl you’re good friends with.” That isn’t one of the roles. That’s the girl you should marry, and you are limping, uncommitted, living for yourself instead of taking your life seriously. Friends was a t.v. show that totally ignored the normal course of life. They married off the friends in the end, but in real life, you aren’t supposed to wait until the series ends. At 29, it should not scandalize you that your grandmother thinks you should get on with things.

A blogger for Rachel Maddow discovered an admittedly strange Fox panel discussing a recent Pew study that found women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of American households. The blogger makes a good point that everyone on the panel was male, and for my part, I thought it was pretty unfortunate that they seemed so emotional and threatened when they expressed that men are supposed to be “dominant.”

I agree that this statistic probably indicates a problem in our society. But as a woman, I might talk about it differently.

Someone told me a story recently: When she was younger she was part of a Christian young adult group of some kind, and all these single young women were distressed that none of the men in the group would marry them. She met her husband in that group, and he later told her that the young men noted among themselves that all those young women seemed too independent: the men didn’t feel they were needed, and it was a turn-off. She was surprised, because all of those women really wanted caretakers! But if nobody offers himself, what are they supposed to do? They have to hold themselves up, pretend things are fine. They have to work to support themselves. They have to smile.

Another story: Once, a young-adult group I was in welcomed a registered sex offender into its midst. I was pretty uncomfortable with it. And of course it was just my luck that he set his creepy sights on me (he was a lot younger, creepy in an emotionally clingy way, not in a physically threatening way). The sex offender went to my best friend–and the only man in my life who could serve as my defender–and asked if I was available. My friend said yes! He said yes! He gave a sex offender permission to pursue me! When I later expressed dismay, he said, “Well, I wondered whether I should try to stop him, but I figured you were able to take care of yourself.” That is one of the most sickening things I’ve ever heard.

It’s true; I can tell a guy to leave me alone. But that’s because I have to. What are women supposed to do when the men whom God has given responsibility for taking care of them just abdicate?

A young man I know talks a big talk about men being leaders, initiators, protectors, providers. But he absolutely refuses to apply his theory to his own life. While all his friends have paired off with the young women in their lives, he remains alone, wagging his finger at everyone else. (He seems to think masculinity means he should date a new girl every month so he can feel like a ladies’ man, and as long as he opens doors for women he’s done all that has been asked of him.) Right next to him is a girl, his best friend, who suits him like a glove and gives him a lot of care and companionship and help. She lives alone. She is looking for work, because the things she wants to do with her life don’t pay much. She’d like more than anything to be a wife and mother for her best friend. When she expresses concern about her future, he blithely suggests she get a job selling things door-to-door. When she feels alone, companionless, he suggests she hang out with her younger sister’s college-age friends. That is, when God has given him a straightforward opportunity to be a leader to a woman who really needs it, from him specifically, he says to her: you’re on your own! Fend for yourself. Even your best friend won’t take care of you. Nobody wants to be responsible for your wellbeing. Sell things door-to-door. Act like a college student forever.

It is a huge betrayal. It is easy to correct, if he finds the bravery to step up to the plate. But if even the women who clearly want men to be their leaders are turned away like this, I see little hope for us to re-build a healthy society based on strong marriages and families.

So, maybe it is a problem that 40% of households are supported by women. But I bet it isn’t just that women are trying to compete with men (as the panel suggests). We’ve been abandoned, even by those who more than most should know better.

I want to celebrate an internet meme that I saw recently! I keep saying that married people need to do more of this. Pretty much every happily married couple I am friends with has spoken about the importance of friendship in selecting a spouse. (They know the secret! There is a reason they’ve won the game.) Many of them seem concerned that their unmarried friends don’t seem to understand, and are ending up in problematic situations (whether with people they date or as differently-aged adolescents who find it increasingly hard to justify their choices).

I think it is really interesting that we have to have the conversation at all! We shifted away from old cultural norms, and now, if we want to return to them, we have to make them explicit for the first time and argue them. In the past, everyone was expected to marry, and they made their decisions much more efficiently. My grandparents talk about friendship like it’s obvious, about finding someone headed in the same direction, about common sense next steps to take with someone who is a natural companion. A now-famous marriage psychologist has demonstrated scientifically (with a level of statistical precision that is almost unsettling) that good friendship is the seed and sustainer of romance. That is, if you are willing to intend to love your friend. But doesn’t it seem funny that we had to prove it?

Will our new explicit instructions make a difference? I have my doubts. I’m not sure it is as persuasive as those social expectations used to be. It’s one thing to fall into the pattern that surrounds you. It is another to be intellectually persuaded of an argument, and further to admit that it applies to you, and then to translate that into a habit of thought and action. This meme is a step in the right direction. It has been shared more than 80,000 times on Facebook. I don’t have to be persuaded by psychologists, because the truth of the claim about friendship is evident in the lives of people all around me. And the ugly counterexamples among my acquaintances further demonstrate the truth! Even on Facebook, I am always seeing people post status updates about how their spouses are their best friends. May my single friends read those status updates! May they notice them and find the healthy pattern!

Are you married to your best friend? Tell Facebook! Better yet, tell your friends, so they know what the foundation of your marriage really is. They may not know! They may think you are trading sex for cooking. They may think you married for infatuation! For the past few decades we have all but forgotten what makes a good marriage, and it is hurting us. But now, we need to get serious.

I have said before on this blog that I suspect the best strategy for fighting prolonged adolescence is simply for those who are aware of the problem to marry their best friends and then tell others all about it, demonstrating better, healthier expectations and patterns for their peers and those slightly younger.

Among those close to me are several very good couples who seem to understand the project of life, and a few textbook older (differently-aged?) adolescents. But the other day, someone surprised me by doing exactly what I recommend as strategy. Unasked for! She married a little later in life. I think of her and her husband as amazingly well-suited to one another. They live life on the same wavelength. They have the same sense of humor. On facebook, their profile pictures are adorable photographs of the two of them together.

I’ve never talked with her about prolonged adolescence, so I was surprised to hear her offer the story of how she and her husband met and married.

Someone asked her about her master’s degree. After talking briefly about school she said that she met her husband in that program. They met at 8:00 a.m. on the very first day of class. They became friends (anyone who knows them can see how that would happen quickly for these two). They were, in fact, very good friends through the whole three-year program. He never pushed, but all her friends kept telling her that she should go ahead and try a romantic relationship with him. For three years she protested to her friends that she “didn’t like him like that.” He was just a friend. Just a best friend? Just a friend.

She decided to go on for a PhD at a different school, and he helped her re-locate and took her out to dinner at a restaurant in her new city. To say “goodbye” to his dear friend. She says, as she was sitting there talking to him, she realized that she did not want to be without this friendship. It was valuable and rare. In the end, there is only one way to keep a friend around.

That realization effectively marked the beginning of their romantic relationship, and they were married shortly thereafter, and have since become, at least to me without knowing this story, a model marriage.

I’d like to offer this story without any more comment, because I think that stories like these themselves are what will make the difference against prolonged adolescence. Not theory, but real patterns—the real examples of people around us who can give us a real picture of what life looks like on the other side of those intimidating grown-up decisions like committing to the people God has given you.

I will add, however, as a testimony to God’s great storytelling ability, that I got to hear this story just before a good friend of mine went away for a job interview in another city. My head was full of thoughts about priorities, about a society that has forgotten to value people as unique and relationships as irreplaceable. I was thinking about people I’ve said goodbye to because of forces beyond our control. And I was thinking about how tragic (in the proper literary sense) it is that we sometimes actually chose to abandon the most important things in our lives. I’ve done it, I think. We have to lose people all the time: to death and other things we can’t help. We ought to be doing all we can to make sure we aren’t adding needlessly to the losses. I’m not sure God was “trying to tell me anything” by letting me hear this story when I did. But it seems that God does hear even my unspoken prayers and concerns, and he takes the time to tell me so, as a courtesy.

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.

“Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other.” So says Walter Lippmann. “Love is not just looking at each other; it is looking in the same direction.” So says Antoine de Saint-Excupéry. In Eden, Adam is given Eve as a fitting helper. The first function of the relationship is partnership. Maybe God tells humanity generally to reproduce and manage the earth. But everything we’re told about individual relationships points to partnership. “It is not good for Man to be alone.” (Brigham Young agreed, saying that every unmarried man over the age of 26 is a menace to society.) Adam is delighted to see someone like himself.

With whom do you love “many things together”? Who seems to be “looking in the same direction” as you? It seems as though some of my unattached peers, especially those prone to over-thinking and intellectualizing and abstraction (I seem to know a lot of those!) don’t realize—or feel rather grudging—that those questions really articulate the whole project.

One friend of mine told me that her young man (at that time “just friends”) said to her, “We seem to think about things the same way.” Now, she’s a woman, so she knows what that means. There’s an “ought” attached to it. But he’s a man, so he knew her for years before they became a couple. They’re together now, and if you ask me, they probably already know almost as much as they need to. There are some really consistent indicators of couple potential. That line is one of them. Someone asked them about it—How long have you two known each other? And you’ve just started dating recently? “Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it turns out this is way better.”

I understand that there is a cloudy barrier preventing people (mostly men?) from seeing what things are like on the other side of committing to someone like that, even someone who “thinks about things the same way.” I am sympathetic. I have a friend who keeps saying he thinks he’s really bad at envisioning what a job will be like before he takes it, whether he will like it, etc. That is exactly why society needs patterns, norms, and social pressures. People need to be pushed through that cloudy barrier, but these days there is nothing to push them. So they just sortof stand there, saying, “Well, I just don’t wanna; I just don’t know. What if there’s someone better?” When I was younger, and involved with someone who “thought about things the same way I did,” I stalled the same way, and there was nothing to give me a push beyond that cloud. Couldn’t I spend a little more time looking for younger or prettier? But young and pretty (for example) isn’t the point, of course. And it isn’t common to be “looking in the same direction.” And people waste a lot of time.