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The marriage rate has fallen to its lowest ebb ever. Raising it should be the highest priority possible.
I’ll never forget the month two decades ago that my wife April and I met two men whose stories convinced us to dedicate ourselves to marriage prep, then and ever since.
First, we saw Mr. Camarata at lunch.
When we lived in Connecticut, we often spent time at a friend’s house. He lived next door to a rental home owned by an Italian couple — I’ll call them the Camaratas.
Mr. Camarata was a very angry man. He was a very hands-on landlord who was always hanging around the house, demanding one thing or another from tenants. My friend actually had asked him to watch his language when our children were outside playing. It didn’t help.
But then, Mr. Camarata started to act more respectful. April and I happened to go to a diner on the other side of New Haven, where we usually didn't go.
Mr. Camarata was there at the lunch counter, eating alone.
April said hello and stopped to talk to him, and asked him why he was eating so far from home.
He said that this was the diner where he had often taken Mrs. Camarata when they first dated, and he had been eating there since she died.
His life had undergone a profound change. He had come to see how important his wife was to him. His whole demeanor had changed. He went from pit bull to sad puppy.
He told April he wanted to die, and she did all she could to tell him all the reasons life is still worth living, even without his wife, sitting at the counter of this diner where they dated.
Then, a few weeks later, a similar thing happened at the back of our church.
I had to go to the back of church with one of our children, and I noticed a man there. He was respectably dressed and huddled in the corner, crying.
I pointed him out to April, and she went to his side, put her arm on his shoulder and asked him what was wrong. He said his wife had been Catholic, though she hadn’t really practiced her faith since their wedding, and he wasn’t Catholic.
She had died four months ago, and he had been lost ever since. He was going to grief counseling, but he had also been drawn to the Catholic church that would have been hers.
He would come at all hours, he said. It’s the one place where he felt a little peace. He would sit and listen, but something Father had said in his homily that day had hit him, hard, and he lost it.
The homily that day had been about marriage.
April told him in the course of their hushed conversation that he was being drawn to pray for his wife, and that maybe he was being drawn to being Catholic. Christ was clearly using the bond of this man’s marriage to draw him to himself.
In any case, marriage was the key factor in these men’s lives, and they didn’t even know it.
The lesson here is that our spouses are more important to us than we realize. Another lesson is that my wife is a lot better at talking to people about marriage than I am.
But better than both of us is Brad Wilcox, the Virginia University scholar.
His research at the National Marriage Project — and in his book Get Married — spells out how marriage helps both men and women.
He cites the 20022 General Social Survey, which Wilcox calls “the golden standard” survey of its kind. It found that “a combination of marriage and parenthood is linked to the biggest happiness dividends” for both men and women.
As for “married women with children between the ages of 18 and 55, 44% reported that they are ‘very happy,’ compared to 25% of married childless women and 22% of unmarried women,” he said.
For men, 35% of married men ages 18-55 said they were ‘very happy,’ followed by 30% with no children. Less than 15% of unmarried men said they were “very happy.”
“There is no variable in the GSS that compares to a good marriage when it comes to predicting happiness,” he said.
The two men we met years ago in Connecticut would agree.
