Too many are missing out on marriage

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Updated: January 23, 2012 3:38AM

A young single friend mentioned recently that marriage, that most intimate of human relationships, sounds like “work,” so why bother?

It seems to me a lot of people, young and old, are asking exactly that. It’s likely one reason why marriage rates around the world are plummeting, including in the United States.

Couples are still “coupling,”
of course; they are just increasingly living together without being married. That, in turn, allows a person to walk away from a troubled relationship more easily than one can today walk away from a marriage.

Consider that in almost anything in life, we hold most dear what we have invested in the most heavily. What has “cost” us. Who goes to medical school thinking, “I know it will be a piece of cake, and that will make it worth it”? Does anyone come back from the gym and say, “I didn’t work out very hard at all — I feel great”?

We would find such things silly. But, suddenly, when it comes to relationships in general, and marriage in particular, we get scared off by the work involved.

When a man and a woman come together in matrimony, they are starting from a point of being very different. That’s a gift! When you strive to serve and understand and appreciate and have patience with someone who is innately so different, your own soul can expand in a way it might never do otherwise.

What an amazing opportunity so many people miss when they live together without marriage so they can easily walk away if things get rough.

It seems we have fewer opportunities than ever for permanent relationships. Marriage aside, members of extended families — in which one could surely experience the gift of complicated, enduring relationships — now often don’t live near each other, so there’s no need to interact much. People often choose to have fewer and, increasingly, no children, perhaps because it’s “easier” that way. And on it goes.

Of course, I’m all for joyful, fun relationships. They can be a taste of heaven. But the conflict and just the complexity of permanent relationships can be a gift, too.

Yet in so many ways we can and do avoid the work of relationships today. What’s interesting is that I sure don’t notice a culture of people happier for it. Maybe it’s that without the work of relationships, it’s just easier to live selfishly today than it used to be.

Well, it seems to me no irony that that is a taste of paradise lost.

Scripps Howard News Service