When it comes to marriage, the Church isn’t rigid. Here’s why

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The recently released “Lifetimes” by pop star Katy Perry circles around the same idea, and even sees love expanding out into eternity:

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Of course, these are only two more recent examples of an animating principle of countless love songs down the centuries – namely, a declaration of permanent love. Songs about mere lust and passion speak of today, the moment, the here and now; by contrast, songs of love speak of always, forever, the above and beyond. 

These guiding images are not the muck and mud of the shifting world below, but the sun, moon, and stars of the immutable heavens. There’s always something dignified, serious, even sacred in the lover’s ode. 

But while lovers keep singing of lasting love — how could they not? — there’s rightly a certain suspicion and even cynicism that looms over the whole idea today. Is there such a thing as love at all? A materialistic view of the person as nothing but the body is more and more taken for granted; as Faulkner put it, we speak “not of love but of lust ... not of the heart but of the glands.” 

Even if there is such a thing as love — permanent love? The divorce rate in the US has been declining overall, but only because the marriage rate has, too; fewer and fewer people are saying “I do” at all — or, if they are, it’s under the assumption of a “no-fault divorce” escape hatch. We see all around us the rise of the hook-up culture, where fleeting or at least noncommittal sexual relationships supplant any kind of lifelong binding. Whatever we might say to the contrary in our more rhapsodic moments, love appears to be, as a matter of course, impermanent. In short: We don’t really mean what we sing. 

There is one institution that still honors lifelong love as noble and true – and it’s the Catholic Church. Its stubborn refusal of divorce and adultery is well known, and perhaps even admired with curiosity. (“I think people should mate for life,” Woody Allen quipped in Manhattan. “Like pigeons, or Catholics.”) 

This refusal is no mere legalistic convention. On the contrary, the solemnity of the marital vow is the social expression of the solemnity of the lover’s oath, and the sacrament of Matrimony the incarnation of his grandiose vision of “everlasting love.” The Church isn’t rigid when it comes to marriage; it’s romantic.

G.K. Chesterton beautifully captured this connection in his essay “In Defence of Rash Vows”: 

Of course, Chesterton, in his defense of the rashness of vows, was assuming those vows to be permanent — an assumption that no longer holds today. We can stomach rashness, but not permanence, and prefer to avoid both altogether. The secret to the sure, long haul of love, we think, is in a protracted calculation in the beginning and an open-ended ambiguity in the end.

Chesterton saw that the counterintuitive instinct was the correct one: to boldly be bound in the face of uncertainty is to extend and inhabit the certainty of love. Such binding can only come through faith — faith in each other, yes, but more fundamentally and far more importantly, faith in God. As Fulton Sheen put it, it takes three to get married.

None of this to say, of course, that a permanent marriage is always easy, or that it can’t fall apart. Infidelity, abuse, apathy, and a host of other spiritual sicknesses can corrupt the beauty of the sacrament. The ideal of permanence, however, is no cruel impossibility. We can also find heroic married couples in the Church serving as shining examples of permanent love — from Blessed Franz Jägerstätter and his wife, Franziska, portrayed in Terrence Malick’s beautiful A Hidden Life, to Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, the parents of St. Thérèse of Liseiux. 

Indeed, we can even find beacons of inspiration closer to home. This past month, my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. By today’s standards, their wedding vows were rather rash: They dated for some months, were engaged for some months, and then were married in the Church at 24 and 29 years old, with very little “figured out” except their love. 

As my brothers and I gave toasts to them, we marveled at how much has transpired, both in the culture and in our family, since 1974 — the year of Watergate. There were so many ups and downs, triumphs and travails, births and deaths. But through it all, my parents remained together, and will forever — a bond of love forged in the furnace of grace.

Without any basis in reality, the love songs of Eilish, Perry, and countless others will forever ring hollow and false. Still, the greatest hope for “happily ever after” is in the Church, which follows the counsel of the ultimate romantic: