Love is No Battlefield

By Scott Yenor

Marriage today is seen as a contract, a voluntary agreement entered by consenting adults. It’s just between the two of them; society and the church, it is thought, must not dictate marriage’s terms.The individuals choose the terms of the contract—how long it should last, what it is concerned with, even who gets to enter into it, or if it has to be “formalized” by a ceremony. But the contractual view often becomes a war of all against all, a struggle ending in divorce and unhappiness. Or, just as bad, marriages do not happen at all as people look for love outside of marriage or see marriage as inconsistent with genuine love.

Why is this? A contract is a limited agreement between two or more parties to use each other for certain purposes. We get a contract with our plumber: he fixes our sink and we pay him. We each pursue our interests in arrangement, and neither of us is changed by it. Today’s contractual marriage is similar in that it does not demand that individuals be transformed by the marriage through the happy and unhappy struggles of living a life with someone. Contracts are based on the idea that we can consent to the arrangement; they assume perfect knowledge about the terms.

Consider the plumber again. A customer can know what he is getting from a plumber: he gets an estimate for a job. Marriage contracts are based on the same idea that we can have perfect knowledge of the relevant traits of character in a future spouse, but this idea is an illusion. No husband or wife can predict what will happen as they share a life together. Unexpected illnesses, physical disabilities, hard times, or countless other circumstances affect how spouses look at one another. If we enter marriage with thinking we can predict its future course, we are likely to be disappointed. If you would have told my wife when I proposed to her that we would have five kids and live in Boise, Idaho, she may have turned me down!

How can we remedy today’s erroneous view of marriage? Let me borrow a telling phrase from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who described marriage as beginning from the standpoint of contract in order to supersede contract—to replace the contract with something greater. Marriage is when two people become one, when two people give themselves to another. Children illustrate this reality of two people literally becoming one; no knife in the world is sharp enough to separate what comes from a father in a child from what comes from a mother.

This is why marriage is connected to having children. Having children also changes someone, in part because it brings us eye-to-eye with the great power of creation, and in part because child-raising demands that we supersede the standpoint of contract and live for another. What parent would think of charging his children for the costs they impose? What husband and wife sit down and try to divide the jobs of the family with perfect justice? Both marriage and family life are defined by love where we do not really count the costs.

No parent chooses the particular children that they get, nor do we choose what our spouse will be twenty years down the line. Our feeble attempts to define these institutions as contracts run up against the facts of the created order. Marriage and family life are where we learn to live with and love imperfect people. Studies show that married people are happier, healthier, wealthier, and live longer than unmarried people. This is exactly what I would expect from an institution made by God for the benefit of human beings.

All of what we learn about marriage by observing it is captured by the exchange between Christ and the Pharisees in Matthew 19. When the Pharisees try to trap Jesus by asking Him if divorce is permissible, Jesus responds that Moses allowed divorce because of the “hardness of your hearts.” Hardened hearts are hearts that are not affected by other hearts, hearts that do not allow themselves to be molded with another’s heart. “In the beginning,” when marriage was instituted, “it was not” as Moses commanded. God made human beings man and woman, and in marriage, those two became one flesh. Soft hearts yield to one another, serve one another, and are willing to die for one another. Soft hearts mold together into one. Such love is among the greatest human experiences for it mirrors, however faintly and imperfectly, the love that God has for all people in Christ. Marriage is based on this kind of love, no matter what others who consider marriage a contract might say.

Dr. Scott Yenor teaches political science at Boise State University. His e-mail address is syenor@boisestate.edu.

The Marriage of the Virgin. The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, Willi Kurth, editor. (New York: Arden Book Company, 1936).