Creating and Sustaining, a Healthy Marriage

“Love is simple.”

“Love is love.”

Is it any wonder young people feel lost in love? They are often left without solid wisdom, models, and experience. Is it any wonder they’re not getting married, having seen too many marriages fail and living in a culture of extravagant, unrealistically unfair and unjust expectations and harmful advice?

A lot of what has hurt marriage and family life in the United States and elsewhere in the West has to do with very fundamental and practical questions, not necessarily what always makes headlines.

As a synod on the crisis facing family life today continues at the Vatican, seeking pastoral solutions to meet the needs of men and women and children today, Christopher Kaczor speaks about a book he collaborated on with his wife, Jennifer, called The Seven Big Myths about Marriage: What Science, Faith and Philosophy Teach Us about Love and Happiness, just blocks from the White House, at the Catholic Information Center tonight. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board there.)

I talked with Christopher at length for National Review Online about the book and the myths here and share a second conversation I had from Jennifer’s perspective.

Q: You worked with your husband on a marriage myth book. Why did you think it was important for there to be a dialogue between the two of you in it?

A: The primary reason Chris wanted to include me in this book was to achieve a sort of “realism” concerning married life. It is easy to idealize marriage, and certainly easy to idealize other people’s marriages. My hope is that people will read the book and become encouraged about the possibility of creating, and sustaining, a healthy marriage. A healthy marriage, by the way, is not always a happy one. Difficulties will arise, and they must be faced. I think there is a tendency, among Catholics, to pretend like one’s marriage and children are always fine, and to shun secular resources. While I’m not an advocate of airing dirty laundry in public, I do think that by acknowledging our struggles, we open the door for healing, and we send the signal to others that they can seek help, too. My voice is, hopefully, the whisper of realism that allows the reader to put their trust in Chris’s excellent philosophical and theological work.

Q: What makes you guys experts on marriage?

A: We are most certainly not experts on marriage. I will say, however, that over the last 22 years, we have learned a great deal. We have had some very serious disagreements that caused us each a great deal of pain. Overcoming those disagreements, and healing the wounds that they created, has given us greater insight into what it means to be “one body.”

Q: What’s the most important point in the book, in your estimation?

A: The most important point in the book, in my opinion, is actually the introduction. If people are introduced to the inherent gifts bestowed on those achieving level 3 and level 4 happiness, they will be more invested in striving to live at those levels, and will bless their spouses, and the world, with love.

Q: Why do you see same-sex marriage as a threat to marriage?

A: Chaste living has become largely foreign to our culture and we are seeing the results. The viewing of pornography is incredibly rampant and pernicious. It threatens nearly every marriage in America. Sodomy is likewise unhealthy, and no longer relegated to homosexuals. So-called “open” marriages and the “swinger” scene is equally disturbing. Casual “hook-ups” are tearing apart, and scarring our youth, making them much more likely to divorce. A more meaningful conversation would be: “How can we address sexual perversion of every kind in our society?” That, I believe, is the real threat to marriage. There are, in fact, many homosexual persons who chose to live chastely together–particularly women, but also some men. [See the recent documentary from Courage, Desire of the Everlasting Hills.] We ought to encourage chastity wherever we find it.

Q: It’s a controversial and perhaps even archaic statement to say that “Procreative potential and bodily union belong together.” Why is it important to propose this in the current day?

A: As a sort of follow-up, I believe very deeply in the idea that “procreative function and bodily union belong together.” Consider what has actually happened in society. We treated the procreative and unitive aspects of sex as separate. We dismissed the procreative, thought we were cutting it off like dead wood, and expected the unitive to then thrive, free of the “diseased” branch. But, in fact, we are slowly killing the organism. Forty years later, after having poisoned the procreative function, the unitive function of sex is withering and dying. Real relationships (unions) have been abandoned for impersonal “hook-ups” and “open” marriages. Self-pleasuring, aided by pornography, is, for some young people, actually preferable to real sex. Perversions abound. Young people have been duped. But they can be un-duped.

Q: Can you make such proposals without judging people’s different choices and experiences?

A: Young people are particularly sensitive when they suspect they, or their peers, are being “judged.” We have to be careful. We have to come from a place of love. I always tell my kids: “I’m not ‘judging’ you (or your friend), I am lovingly suggesting that you might want to consider another angle.” I always talk about intentions, and am careful to give them, and their friends, the benefit of the doubt. I am also careful about choosing what subjects to address. My kids know that I am absolutely unwavering on abortion. On the other hand, they can count on me to look the other way if they walk out the door in short shorts. We have to be reasonable in our expectations. We can’t count all sins as equal or we lose our moral authority. Sexual purity is a difficult topic for today’s youth. But if consistently presented as the best choice for their happiness and the happiness of those they love, it can be digested, and achieved.

Q: Whatever is “lasting joy,” which comes up in the book?

A: The only lasting joy I can fathom is that of being a saint.