MARCIA BARLOW

What's Love Got to Do with It? The Fundamental Nature of Marriage

"No, Lauren, marriage isn't about romantic love. In fact I'm not sure if it's about love at all." The shock registered on the face of my idealistic 18-year-old daughter as I revealed my new epiphany regarding marriage.

In my role as a pro-family advocate, I had been struggling to determine the best strategy to approach the same-sex marriage debate and Lauren was my test audience.

"You aren't going to score many points with that one, Mom," Lauren replied earnestly. "People are in love with being in love."

Indeed, people are "in love with being in love." Verification of that fact is conspicuously evident in every form of popular entertainment, especially the latest "chick flick." Love, it seems, is universally regarded as the single most important ingredient for a successful marriage.

Is love the basis of marriage?

Considering the philosophy of the past millennia, the notion that marriage is primarily about love is a relative newcomer. It has only been the last century or so that the idea of romantic love within a marriage has been held in such high esteem.1 When romantic love became the basis of modern marriage, society sowed the seeds of the divorce culture. If marriage is just about love, once you "fall" out of love, then there is no reason to stay married. Studies on the "in love" experience have shown that the average life span of romantic obsession is two years.2

When the obsession fades, and the realities of everyday life set in, it can be a rude awakening to couples who anticipated that marital bliss would last forever. The real meaning of marriage has been lost on many of us.

Marriage was never just about romantic, Hollywood-style love (attested to by the fact that arranged marriages were the norm for hundreds of years and are still the norm in some cultures today). Real love is a by-product; the reward, of a successful marriage.

Dr. Gary Chapman explains, "That kind of love requires effort and discipline. It is the choice to expend energy in an effort to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you, too, will find a sense of satisfaction -- the satisfaction of having genuinely loved another. It does not require the euphoria of the "in love" experience. In fact, true love cannot begin until the 'in love' experience has run its course."3

Marriage has also been a mechanism for ordering societies. Marriage is the union of two families; the foundation for establishing kinship patterns and family names, passing on property and providing the optimal environment for raising children. Marriage has many intergenerational components. It is a commitment to the past generation as well as to the future. Marriage is a blending of bloodlines as well as generations.

An example of this is royal families who marry with the intent of binding countries together. These are just a few of the many components to marriage that are lost on contemporary culture. Marriage has a far more fundamental and influential role than simply a public or legal documentation of "love." We love many people that we don't marry. If feelings of love or affection were all that mattered, fathers would be able to marry their own daughters, brothers could marry sisters, and people could even marry their dogs. If marriage were based solely on one's affections, the need for companionship, the desire for genital stimulation or a wish for increased benefits, the possible arrangements would be endless. Redefining marriage would reduce it to a commitment between any two individuals or entities and there are many relationships in society that would meet the new criteria.

Societies and governments in the "marriage business?" Loving, committed relationships standing alone are of no interest to government -- no interest unless they have the potential to produce a tangible benefit --  children. Simply stated, government entered into the "marriage business" because of children. A stable marriage between a man and a woman is the only relationship that has the biological potential to produce children and then provide the best and most successful environment in which to rear the next generation. Successful societies have always understood this.

Heterosexual marriage and childbearing is a government and societal imperative. Marriage is not an issue of love, rights or sexual preference.

It is an issue of which activities and unions provide societies with a net benefit and which do not. There is no societal benefit to homosexual unions which are based primarily on genital stimulation and the perception of love.

Each heterosexual couple that marries can give a child they create or adopt a mother and a father. Homosexual couples can never create nor provide a child with both a mother and a father.

No matter how you slice the petri dish, (artificial insemination, alternate surrogacy, or any other way science and the legal system may invent to procure a child) it still requires a male sperm (father) and female egg (mother). Adoption by homosexual couples requires that at least one biological parent legally sever their natural bond and render a child either motherless or fatherless. Adoption has never been about transcending biology to meet the desires of adults (heterosexual or homosexual) to experience parenthood; adoption is about restoring to a parentless child that which was lost -- both a mother and father. By institutionalizing same sex marriage/adoption we would intentionally strip a child of a mother or a father and thus publicly and legally decree that the presence of both parents in the life of a child is utterly insignificant.

What is the fundamental nature and purpose of marriage?

With the exception of this recent "blink" in time and the advent of radical feminism, mothers have always been, by nature, bound to their children.

One could argue that fathers, not mothers, need a securing tie. Marriage is the tie that secures fathers to children -- an eternal pattern.

Primitive societies that acknowledged the connection between the sex act and the arrival of a child developed ways to secure a father to his children. Those cultures that were able to contain the sex act within a marriage form were then able to progress past the point of the "village" caring for the young. When family units were created, cultures moved forward. Societal stability and progress are inextricably linked to the natural family and marriage.4

Any public policy or advocation of
behavior that diminishes traditional marriage and the natural family is regressive, not progressive. Children have a fundamental right to a mother and a father; to be born within the bonds of matrimony to parents who honor their marital vows with complete fidelity.

Fatherlessness or motherlessness has serious consequences. We know this from a 40 year experiment with the dismantling of the institution of marriage which has given us an epidemic of out-of-wedlock sex and childbearing, sky-rocketing divorce rates, alternate families, and a deteriorating social fabric.5

Columnist Maggie Gallagher noted: "When men and women fail to form stable marriages, the first result is a vast expansion of government attempts to cope with the terrible social needs that result. There is scarcely a dollar that state and federal government spends on social programs that is not driven in large part by family fragmentation: crime, poverty, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, school failure, mental and physical health problems."6

If we look at the above list of negative consequences resulting from family breakdown, and then examine the startling, well-documented statistics showing their negative impact on children, we can only draw one conclusion: Government can never create enough programs to compensate for out-of-wedlock sex and failure in marriage. The weakened state of marriage today is not a call to further dismantle it, but rather a call to strengthen traditional marriage. Marriage either means something, or it means nothing at all.

Through-out history, marriage has been the means by which governments secure for children their most basic right--their mother and their father in a stable relationship. If the government gives marriage licenses and incentives to individuals who want to form any version of a loving, committed relationship, then marriage becomes meaningless -- just another government handout that meets no imperative.

So what's love got to do with it? Not nearly as much as many of us have supposed. The unprecedented advances in the relentless crusade toward same-sex marriage by homosexual activists can in no small part be attributed to the breakdown of the traditional family, complete with our mistaken notions of the meaning of love and our cavalier attitudes toward marriage.
 
To save marriage, and thus our culture, we must understand timeless truths about marriage and love. If we are to reverse the decades of marital decline, those of us who are the keepers of traditional marriage need to look to our own homes and attitudes. We must refuse to buy into the divorce culture's contemporary ideas about love, attempts of homosexual activists to redefine marriage, or any form of contemporary sexual liberation. Let us regenerate a culture that understands the significance of marriage and in so doing give to our children their most basic right--their mother and father bound together in a faithful marriage covenant.

1 Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "The Divorce Culture," Vintage Books, Random House, Inc., New York, 1996.

2 Gary Chapman, PhD., "The Five Love Languages," Northfield Publishing, Chicago,1995, p. 30.

3 Id. at 35.

4 J. D. Unwin, Sexual Regulations and Human Behavior (London: Williams & Norgate, 1933; Arnold Toynbee, "Why I dislike Western Civilization" New York Times Magazine, May 10, 1964.

5 Patrick F. Fagan and Robert Rector, "The Effects of Divorce on America," The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, No. 373. June 5, 2000.

6 Maggie Gallagher, "The Stakes-Why we need Marriage," National Review, July 14, 2003.