Marriage

I recently read a report about a politician in Bavaria who has thrown scandal into her Catholic state in Germany. Gabriele Pauli told reporters she believes marriage should be a seven-year institution, and that at the end of those seven years, a couple can elect whether their marriage will extend or will be automatically dissolved.

When I do premarital counseling I often tell my clients that I have been married for 37 years. I also tell them that in those 37 years I have fallen in love with my husband six or seven times, and, if I were to be honest, there have been at least six or seven times that I have thought, “Oh my goodness—what was I thinking?” So, if I do the math, about every five or six years I might have opted out of marriage if I had been given the chance. No doubt one of those times would have fallen at the same time as the expiration date proposed by Gabriele Pauli. I have never done premarital counseling with a couple that believes their marriage will end in divorce. As a matter of fact, most of the time when I talk about common problems in marriage their eyes glaze over and they tell me, “That won’t happen to us, we’re in love!” Yet almost 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce, many of them within the first seven years.

So, is it impossible to stay happily married? I guess it depends on how you view marriage. Is marriage something you only stay in as long as you are happy? Or did you mean the vows you repeated at your wedding, promising a commitment during the easy and hard times, till death makes you part? Those are tough promises to live up to on the days when you not only don’t feel love for your spouse, but you really don’t even like him or her! 
I wonder how many people would still be married if they were given a legal escape every seven years.

For me, marriage is more than a contract that can be broken if I’m not happy. My commitment to marriage is more about my faithfulness to the vow I took before God than my “love” (or feelings of love) for my husband. Feelings are fleeting and dependent on circumstances. While there may be many days that I do not feel “in love” with my husband, my love for him is a decision that I act upon even when I don’t feel like it.