Marriage — for the Common Good?

In Comment, James K.A. Smith looks at marriage from a different perspective:

This romantic picture is already enacted in the honeymoon: to kindle your marriage, you need to “get away,” retreat from the drudgery of the workaday world (which is, apparently, matrimonial poison). For your marriage to last, according to this logic, you’ll have to keep planning dates and romantic escapes for just the two of you to “keep the fire alive.” And by all means, don’t have children too soon: they are, according to this myth, the equivalent of a marital buzzkill, because marriage is romance and romance is just the two of you.

Too many weddings are spectacles in which we celebrate your dyadic bliss. We’re there more as spectators than partners. And in that sense, they are often preludes to the sorts of marriages that follow. When lovers are staring into one another’s eyes, their backs are to the world.

Read the whole thing here.