Marriage: Good Until…

So I came across this article where the author, who had seen many of her friends her age end their marriages after decades of being together, began wondering if marriages should be created with an expiration date.

(READ the entire article HERE: “Do you promise to love and cherish…until the contract runs out?“)

Her line of thought is summed up with the question: “what do you think about the idea that when people get married they sign a marriage certificate that has an actual end date on it?” She reasons that since it seems as though there are plenty of people who reach the later stages in life and want to end their marriage that perhaps it is unreasonable to ask someone to be your spouce for the rest of your life, or in her words, “With people’s life span being what it is, does it really make sense that we get married to one person for our entire lives no matter how long that turns out to be?”

Luckily, she doesn’t end the article concluding that we need end dates on our marriage contracts, but I could see how some might think this idea a good one. I have a few thoughts on this line of thinking and how I believe a Christian should think through this as well.

Firstly, I think that this expiration idea is just another sign that marriages are no longer seen as sacred. People cling to their autonomy, their “freedom”, and at any sign that their desired lifestyle is in jeopardy they want a way out. Rather than a traditional divorce – an end to a marriage at any given time – the expiration idea ends the marriage at an appointed time. Either way this is a devalued view of marriage and highlights the modern view that marriage is only good when both people are happy and feel good.

Secondly, the idea of an expiration date skews what marriage really is. The expiration date idea promotes the idea that marriage is nothing more than a contract. This is a bad view because like any other contract it can be broken. It is also bad because it fails to recognize the personal nature of a marriage.

Let me explain.

A marriage is not some thing that forces people to stay together, like a legal contract. Too many people make much too big a deal about the legal side of marriage (that’s not to say that we should allow marriage to be legal for anyone, say a person and a robot). Marriage is personal, it involves the will of a person. It is not a contract that must be adhered to, it is a voluntary decision made by the participants. Marriages sort of have an expiration date. Whenever a married person calls it quits, the marriage expires. Let’s not pretend that a divorce is hard to accomplish or that the process is a deterrent. That option is available to any married person any day. There is no external force that will keep two people together in a marriage. But millions of people every day, under no external persuasion, voluntarily decide to remain committed and faithful to their spouse. In a sense, if their marriage expired at the end of every day, they would wake up the next morning and renew their marriage all over again without a hesitation.

The personal nature of marriage must be understood. To anyone who sees marriage as a sacred union before God this is not hard to understand. But our culture is unaware of this. Our culture sees marriage very differently. It is important to promote within our culture the value that God places on a proper marriage. When a couple credits their commitment to one another on the principles that God has set forth in His design for marriage. Until everyone understands that, we will always have people try to accommodate marriage to our feelings and fickleness