Jeff and I celebrated our third anniversary this past week on March 8. We had to work, so it was a small affair, just a dinner out without our dogs.
Our anniversary brought me to think of our wedding vows and something someone I know said recently that bothered me.
This person was referring to Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war protestor. This individual told me that he had told his wife that if she did what Cindy Sheehan did he would divorce his wife on the spot. (This couple has a son in the military.) I wasn't bothered by this person's politics, but I was bothered by the fact that this one action would warrant an immediate divorce. After all, I know that Jeff and I vowed before our family and God that our marriage was "for better or worse." And if that was worse, it would be something we would have to get through. I wondered if this man I was speaking with vowed the same thing to his wife.
I feel that far too many people take marriage too casually today. It is so easy to get a divorce, that fewer and fewer men and women seriously examine the job they are undertaking. I have met a lot of women who feel so desparately that they must be married to be fulfilled that they are less interested in finding the person they are supposed to fulfill this vocation with than just to find someone period. And it's not just women. A man my husband worked with is on his second marriage and is not reportedly happy and hasn't been. Another man my husband worked with is divorcing his second wife, a woman he met and married within a year of divorcing his first wife. This same man was engaged several times before tying the knot the first time.
It is sad for me to see all of these marriages rushed into and ending so soon. Then on top of that to see people who have been married for a significant amount of time saying that their marriage would end with no questions asked based on one incident is too much for me to comprehend sometimes.
Jeff and I were married in a Methodist church and the minister who married us required us to go through counseling sessions. In one session he asked us why we wanted to be married and what our expectations of the marriage were. I answered honestly that I believed that marriage was a vocation and that it was something you did once. The minister then commented that even if he hadn't known I was Catholic he would have guessed it because the one thing he believed that Catholics did right and Protestants were wrong about was making marriage a sacrament. He felt Protestants should be doing the same thing or at the very least at least treating marriage sacramentally.
I don't know that this is a Catholic/Protestant issue and I don't want to make it one. What I wish for people, all people, is that if they are led to married life, that they examine and discern their choice fully.
1 comment:
38 years and counting. It's work. You have to work to make a marriage work. Many people have the attitude "if it don't go my way I'll just get a divorce."
Lots of disagreements at my house but each of us learned something each time. Congrats on the third and many more happy ones on the way I'm sure. You seem to have what it takes to get there.
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