Marriage is better thought of as a purpose to be served, in which the long story of love unfolds

Choosing Transformational Marriage

By Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig

A culture built on hacks doesn’t have much time for institutions or circumstances that are simply un-hackable in the long term. Thus you can find without much intensive searching a handful or more of articles per week revealing the (usually counter-intuitive) secret to hacking marriage: the latest trend, featuring a near constant stream of iterations in various publications, is polyamory.

It isn’t that the concept is new (from tacit understandings about mistresses to bell-bottomed ‘key parties’, philandering has alwayshad an array of raiment to dress it up) or that the concept itself is any more salacious than the next that encourages the ongoing rumination on it, but rather that the idea of a solution to the problem of marriage is always tantalizing, especially when snap-fingers simple. Just do this, the usual marriage-secret article goes,and you’ll be happy, which is how you know your marriage is succeeding.

Thus, much of public discourse on marriage is devoted to figuring out what hacks can be applied to stave off dissatisfaction and ultimately divorce. Aiming to obviate marital discord (as much as policy can) seems wise to me; on the other hand, the notion that dissatisfaction’s natural conclusion is divorce seems to reveal a serious problem in how we conceive of marriage culturally. Should we imagine marriage to be an arrangement wherein personal satisfaction is the goal, or is it more intelligible theologically and socially to imagine marriage as its own project, something transformative and worthy of our service in its own right?

I agree with Stanley Hauerwas that the latter approach is the wiser one. According to Hauerwas, defining marriage as a tool for either the expression of a particular sentiment or the maintenance of it is, given the vicissitudes of satisfaction, a recipe for disaster:

We assume a couple falls in love and come to the church to have their love publicly acknowledged. One problem with this romantic view is that it tends to the presumption that if the love that was initially present in the relationship is no longer present, the marriage no longer exists. Romantic accounts of marriage simply cannot comprehend the church’s view that marriage names the time created through a faithful promise that makes possible the discovery of love.

In other words, the view of marriage that imagines quick-fixes to be solutions to prevent the dissolution of the marriage already mistake the nature of the institution. In the view Hauerwas calls the ‘romantic’ view, marriage obtains insofar as love does because it is only ever a declaration of love; the deluge of media mediating on how to restore affection, satisfaction, or interest to a marriage is evidence of this sense of divorce as the inevitable outcome of weakened sentiments.

Yet, all these projects intend to manipulate marriage to better serve one’s own purposes, while, as Hauerwas points out, marriage is better thought of as a purpose to be served, in which the long story of love unfolds. And though the utter saturation of pop theories on how to rig the perfect marriage may suggest otherwise, evidence on the foundations of lasting, happy marriages actually supports the more orthodox view.

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