Making an Idol of Marriage
Making an Idol of Marriage
You don't graduate at the altar
This weekend, I’ll be attending FCLNY’s symposium on contemporary feminism. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing from Erika Bachiochi and Eva Feder Kittay. On Thursday, I’ll share highlights from your discussion of the names we give to older women.
I greatly appreciated this thread on twitter from Grant Hartley. I’ll put the first tweet below, and then compile several of his comments in the thread as a blockquote.
Grant went on to say (condensed a little by me):
When Christians proudly share that married people are statistically happier, healthier, wealthier, and live longer than unmarried people, we are often left wondering how we will survive, or if our lives are worth it.
When Christians speak glowingly and at length about how “nothing can mature character like marriage,” we are often wondering if we will ever be taken seriously or seen as mature.
Marriage is not “the most profound relationship there is,” or at least, it is not so simple. When Jesus looks for an image to describe the epitome of human love, he chooses sacrificial friendship (John 15:13), which is open to all. Marriage is a kind of friendship.
That unmarried people are statistically less happy and healthy, poorer, and live shorter lives owes much to the structural un-livability of celibacy in our communities, rather than being unmarried itself.
Grant is right, not just about celibate gay Christians, but about anyone who is single. It’s common to frame marriage as though it’s a “graduation” into adulthood—as though everything that comes before marriage is a dress rehearsal.
In my book, Building the Benedict Option, all my strategies for creating community are meant to be applied over the scale of the next two weeks to two months. Wherever you are, you’re called to sacrificial friendship here and now, not after you hit some future milestone.
When we look at how we arrange our schedules, our neighborhoods, our laws, there has to be room for friendships to be taken every bit as seriously as marriage. There is no limit to the gift we can make of ourselves—our calling isn’t circumscribed by a ring.
I have been thinking about this a lot since returning to the church. I'm a single, celibate woman, and while not gay, other of my life circumstances combine with church teaching to make marriage seem extremely improbable.*
At any rate I couldn't agree with Grant more. What he puts his finger on is probably my single biggest criticism of the Church. Being lay, single, celibate, and called to live out your apostolate in the world is the *default state,* the normal thing, and should be regarded that way, with all the support and encouragement for living out that state of life that we give to vocations.
But we've twisted it around, so that having a vocation (to marriage, the priesthood, or vowed religious life) is seen as the default, or what we all 'should' be doing, and living out a lay, single, chaste, etc life is seen as deficient or pitiable. Not cool, Church. Not cool.
I'd like to see the Church doing the following things:
-Being clear that marriage is a vocation that you are specifically called to, not the basic expectation of adulthood.
-Supporting its lay, single members in both finding and living out the apostolate to which each is called. Off the top of my head, one way this could look would be small groups for singles not focused on finding a spouse but instead focused on living out the work God is calling us to by virtue of NOT calling us to married or religious life.
-The conservative parts of the church need to avoid lifting up marriage and motherhood for women as the highest calling, the best and only apostolate. I'm a mother, and it certainly is both a high calling and an apostolate, but it's toxic to make it into The One Thing. This is basically just what Grant said, except I agreed so much I had to say it again.
-The liberal parts of the church need to similarly avoid lifting up romantic love as their One Most Important Thing. It isn't. For a group of people who likes to say that 'love is love,' they sure seem to be talking about only a very specific kind of love. (Yes I know I sound salty; I've been hurt by this one personally.)
In the secular world, I agree with everyone who has talked about the need to have legislated support structures for singles. My oldest friend is my health-care proxy; that much I could manage. Another, local, friend is my emergency contact for absolutely everything I could make him the emergency contact for. I could manage that too. My sister is also the beneficiary on my life insurance. That's allowed. But...there's no way to share health insurance benefits with someone to whom you're not married, just for instance. The sick days problem is real, and also just the social acceptance of deciding to prioritize friendships. I once called out of work because another single friend landed in the hospital, and while I'm essential at work and I knew my job was safe, it was regarded as bizarre. Who takes off of work to take care of a friend? Similarly, when Covid hit many of the rules for lockdowns seemed to ignore the fact that single people even exist. I was terrified that I would be sick at home, not sick enough to go to the hospital but too sick to take care of myself, and that no one would break the rules to come take care of me.
oof I am looking for a good way to close the comment and failing. Just that...yes, this is a thing, yes, it is a problem, and lastly that while I think a multiplicity of factions in our cultural world have created this problem, both right and left, I put a huge onus on the Church to fix it.
*(I live in a small liberal city in a liberal state where a refusal to have sex outside of marriage is an absolute dealbreaker for the overwhelming majority of men. I also have a child, with all the history that implies, and while I am free to marry in the church, my history is an absolute dealbreaker for the remaining tiny fraction of men. I am just a bundle of dealbreakers.)
Being Baptist, I don't have a tradition that even allows for a form of consecrated virginity at all. It's not good, of course, that for Catholics the religious life is often portrayed as a second-best option, but you do at least get the option. Over here we get told a range of things from "woman's chief end is to get married and have children" (wrong) to "some people have the gift of singleness, temporarily or permanently" which always leaves the assumption that, of those, the temporarily single state will be more normal. You're supposed to be content in your single state until it ends. People (like me) who take this literally and are so happy in our single states that we don't want them to end, become an enigma to everyone else --- you're supposed to want to get married. It's the Natural Way Of Things. If you are perpetually single, you're left perpetually hanging in midair, so to speak. When a pastor gets to 1 Corinthians 7 in a sermon he might pay lip service to the idea that perpetual singleness is a good thing, but in practice you're always given the opposite idea.
I'm 23 now, which in my immediate circles is a little old for a girl not to be married yet, and over the last couple of years I've turned my argumentative tendencies toward advocating that No, Actually, This Is Good. It's not very easy, though, when so many of the books and articles and people's lives that make good sources on the subject come from outside the theological tradition of the people I'm talking to --- and not just from outside but from the (in many cases) extremely suspect Catholics (gasp!). Which doesn't make it easier for an already sceptical audience to accept my claims. They can get used to the idea of me being perpetually single because they've known for years that I'm eccentric, but to argue that it's a perfectly good way of life for *other* people? That's more difficult. I did find a lecture by Sam Allberry that made sense to the two people who've actually listened to it so far, so that was a big victory. But as much as I'd like to start the first ever Baptist order of nuns, I think we're still ages away from getting even the concept of consecrated virginity.
I'm trying to be the person who places friendships at the heart of their life, but when so many of your friends are of the opposite sex and you move in the circles described above, that brings its own set of challenges. I have got to say though, my friendships have certainly been among the best relationships I've had. I don't feel the lack of romance as if my life is missing something. Who needs that when your friends can be counted on to help you with a dead car, or wash your dishes when they come over and see your house is a mess and not judge you for it, or check up on you when you pass out in public (has happened an embarrassing number of times)? Sure, you have to be vulnerable with more than one person, as opposed to the cultural expectation that when you're married you and your spouse do all the taking care of each other (an expectation I also think is wrong). But that spreads out the burden of each individual across more people and lessens what each individual has to carry. I certainly don't think that's a bad thing.