Making and Breaking Vows
Why the dropping divorce rate isn't good news
If you’re thinking of preordering The Dignity of Dependence, the lowest price you’re going to see is direct from Notre Dame University Press as part of their summer sale. Through August 15th, all books are 40% off with the code “14SUM25.”
Once you’ve placed your order, send me your receipt here to get the special bookmarks I commissioned from Grace Russo for people who pre-order. :)
I have two recent pieces on what marriage means today. First, at The Institute for Family Studies, I’m letting some of the air out of Brad Wilcox’s recent Atlantic piece celebrating a resurgence of marriage. We agree that divorce rates are down, but disagree sharply about whether it’s for a good reason.
The declining divorce rate is much more a compositional effect, driven by who isn’t getting married than it is a victory for marriage preparation and promotion.
Pro-marriage conservatives aren’t out to improve the divorce rate at any cost, but to prepare more people to desire the graces of marriage and be prepared to make and keep the vows that marriage entails. It would be a hollow victory to teach the Success Sequence, for example, if it simply convinced more people that marriage was out of reach. The goal should not be to dissuade marginal marriages but to prepare men and women to make strong marriages.
If the divorce rate drops because fewer people feel ready for marriage and more people give up before the altar, that’s not a big win to celebrate! I had some fun brainstorming what trends could be cause for optimism:
It would help to see the divorce rate decline while marriage rates rise. Then we might have reason to believe that people were getting better at being married, rather than that our culture was convincing people to give up on marriage. It would be good to see a reversal of recent trends in the Monitoring the Future study of high school seniors. Boys and girls have, in recent years, seen about a 10% drop in how many of them expect they could be “very good” spouses.
Similarly, a strong future for marriage probably requires a reversal in recent youth trends that show a sharp rise in neuroticism and a corresponding drop in conscientiousness. Care for other people and resiliency are both critical to navigating the ups and downs of marriage. Thinking less of others and becoming more anxiously fixated on one’s own thoughts and feelings makes it harder to match and stay married.
And over at The Dispatch, I’ve got a case against writing your own wedding vows (and also against making your vows privately, a thing some people are apparently doing?)
Classically, the marriage vows are not about the particular couple standing at the altar—they’re about the institution the couple is choosing to enter. Classical vows (for better, for worse, etc) have lasted with only minor revisions for a thousand years. They are intended to suit every couple, uncustomized, and they enumerate the promises that must be kept for a marriage to be a marriage. But customized vows frequently mingle serious promises with ones that cannot or should not be kept.
It’s not necessary in marriage to “always laugh at your jokes,” it’s not necessarily possible to “never go to bed angry,” and it’s actively counterproductive to “pretend not to notice” a particular flaw. For the newlyweds, it’s easy for customized vows to be more backward-looking—telling the story of their relationship so far—rather than looking ahead to the sickness and health, better and worse that awaits them.
Come for the cultural critique, stay for the slapstick attempt to get married despite the refusal of the village priest from I Promessi Sposi. (I read this on our honeymoon and read the entire scene aloud to my husband on our flight).
It’s important for a couple’s vow to be heard and understood by their community, so that everyone can help them keep these promises. If vows are expressive and individual, it’s less clear that they also represent a duty for your surrounding community, all subject to the same institution.
That’s why (as I discuss in the Dispatch piece) the NYT Ethicist can casually dismiss a reader’s question about whether he ought not have an affair with a married man. “Do I have a moral obligation to a man I don’t know?” the letter writer asks. The Ethicist replies, “My sense is that their private understanding remains opaque to you… Your own promises bind you to your husband alone.”
If each marriage is stands alone, you can destabilize your neighbor’s marriage without imperiling your own. If you all dwell in the shared home of an institution, that’s obviously nonsense.
I liked this from a recent wedding sermon from Pater Edmund Waldstein on what ultimately upholds our vows:
But the passion of love, while it seems to promise the infinite, is not sufficient of itself to fulfill that promise. Therefore, it must be completed and guarded by a firm intention of the will. In a few moments you will make a promise to faithfully do good to each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” You will repeat those words line-for-line after the priest, signifying that you are learning from the Church how to make that firm commitment of mutual benevolence and fidelity, which will make of you a stable society in which love can flourish and be shared, a home in which children can be raised to hear the song at the heart of things, in which guests can be welcomed and inspired.
Marriage is ambitious! But it doesn’t rest solely on the husband and wife. Your vows are supported by the infusion of sacramental grace and the example and love of the people around you.
If you want “a stable society in which love can flourish and be shared,” you hope to see many people able to take that leap. Marriage isn’t for the elite—it’s for everyone.
lol you already know what I will say for the last item: a rise in monastic vocations. This is really a proxy for something else, which I suspect your neuroticism/conscientiousness metric is also getting at, but I think it's worth saying that our job is not to get married. Our job is to find a path of life-giving love.
When people were talking about a "sex recession," and replying, "It's really a marriage recession!", it seemed similarly important to note that we are ALSO in a "celibacy recession"--people are just isolated, they're not finding paths of unmarried self-gift.
We were foolish young’uns but still knew well enough to have traditional vows at our tiny pre-deployment wedding. And I’m glad we did: the majority of the personal vows I’ve heard over the years wouldn’t be the sorts of thoughts appropriate for a young bride to declare right before sending her husband off to war.
My husband and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary this past spring. As we’ve gotten older, there have been quite a few times it’s seemed appropriate and even welcomed for us to help newly married folks who were struggling in some way. All were fellow military couples and I think our subculture makes it easier and more acceptable to be your brother/sister’s keeper than in society at large. Many of the times we’ve stepped in has actually been my husband needing to help a younger man better understand his role as a brand new father. It seems sometimes young men aren’t thinking about how their actions impact their wives and they need older, more experienced eyes to tell them this or that isn’t right. Quite a few times my husband has had to explain in particular that the wife has become a mother while the husband has merely had a baby since the baby was born during a deployment and the new father has no idea what his wife might be living through at that moment in time. Everything has always been surprisingly well-received and there have been quite a few times over the years a man has approached me to tell me what my husband did to help save/build his marriage.