Marriage can equal bliss

By: Megan DeWald-Kline

Posted: 12/4/07

The week before my wedding, a former Sunday school teacher of mine presented me with a piece of paper he had kept in his files. It was a questionnaire that he distributed to his students asking the student to imagine his or her life in the future. Next to "age you'll get married," I had written "never" in all caps and with multiple exclamation points. Undoubtedly, a huge factor behind that response was the merciless experiment in public humiliation known as junior high, but I had a good laugh at my 13-year-old feminist self as I finished up the details of my wedding 11 years later.

The truth is that I grew up thinking marriage was ridiculous. I never dressed as a bride for Halloween, I didn't fantasize about my dream wedding, and I could not fathom why any woman would want to shackle herself to a man forever. And I was not alone in this sentiment. No less a life expert than Oprah Winfrey has suggested that humans have evolved beyond the need for marriage.

So, why was I getting married? Women have had to struggle for so much and for so long: for the right to vote, for the recognition of a personhood that amounted to more than the status of property, for the ability to enter the workforce and compete on (somewhat) equal footing with men, for the right to be formally educated. Was I now forsaking my female forebearers?

Recently, I read an article that convincingly argued that marriage is passé, demonstrating that marriage only benefits men. Married women are less financially secure and less healthy than single women, it said. Today, women can be educated, have a successful career, make lots of money and even adopt or birth children outside of marriage. In short, the article suggested that Miss Winfrey was right after all.

After reading this article, I boarded a train headed toward my home where I knew my husband would be waiting for me. And I knew there was something much more meaningful at stake in this whole marriage thing than just two people who like each other a lot, holding each other's "rights" in check. By no means do I think that "traditional family values" (whatever that means) are the answer either. However, it seems counterproductive to me to cast off marriage as the problematic institution in today's society.

Instead, I think marriage requires courage today that it didn't necessarily require before. It takes courage to take it seriously, to stand before friends and family (and God, in my belief) and promise to love another person with all his imperfections. In many ways, I think it requires even more courage to allow another person to promise to love your own imperfect self. I can only imagine that many marriages come to a tragic end because the pain and struggle involved in this process requires more courage than we can muster.

I think we're missing the larger hope for life that our female predecessors imagined when we diminish some of what makes a woman unique by removing her from the possibility of love, wholeness and family that can be found in marriage. Love in marriage is a historical luxury, but it now has a privileged place as its basis. Women can give of themselves in marriage and family in a manner that lovingly embraces them as persons. And children, both male and female, can be raised in an environment of love, equality and affirmation as to who and what they are and can become.

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Unsigned editorials represent the majority opinion of the Cauldron editorial staff. All other columns and opinion pieces represent solely the opinion of the author.