I asked Michael on the phone this morning what he thought was key to a successful marriage. He responded: “faith in God.” I fully agreed with him, of course, but I inquired further: “hmm… think in more secular terms…”
The reason why I raised this question was because a new survey by the The Pew Research Center on marriage and parenting indicates that the percentage of Americans who consider children as being a “very important” factor in a successful marriage has dropped significantly since 1990. A 1990 World Values Survey indicated that 65% of Americans ranked children third in importance to maintain a good marriage. The new Pew survey has shown that this number has dropped to 41 percent. In the new survey, sharing the chores around the house was listed as the top reason for a succesful marriage.
Interestingly–or sadly perhaps–enough, the survey also found that “by a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Americans say the main purpose of marriage is the ‘mutual happiness and fulfillment’ of adults rather than the ‘bearing and raising of children'” as outlined in the NBC’s Today Show’s website.
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project said that “[t]he popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults,” and that “[c]hild-rearing values — sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity — seem stale and musty by comparison.”
When I think of marriage, the first words that come to mind are sacrifice and the gift of self as expressions of mutual love. And these are exactly what Barbara Dafoe says do not have prominence within marriages anymore. When you take, first of all, God out of marriage, and then sacrifice, you end up with a perhaps convenient arrangement between two people to share goods with each other. That is all.
Personally, I think of married love in terms of the trinitarian love. The constant giving and receiving of love that is not self-contained, but pours out to the children and to society as a whole. The existing individualism within marriages that transpires from this new survey should not then be a surprise considering that more than half of marriages result in divorces. As Pope Paul VI suggests:
“[Married love] is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.” (Humanae Vitae, 9)
Also, see related:
Jay’s post on the campaign that the U.S. bishops have started on marriage: “U.S. Roman Catholic bishops began a campaign Wednesday to strengthen the institution of marriage by encouraging spouses to perform simple day-to-day gestures for one another. The campaign, a series of radio and television spots, is part of a broader effort to bring a greater Catholic voice to the debate over the meaning of marriage.”
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