"Stretch Marks"

I read this article in World magazine a few weeks ago and I thought it was one of the simplest and best articles I have read on marriage.  In it Andree Seu Peterson addresses in her own gentle way the opinion -- which has become almost universal among non-Christians in our society -- that it is "insane to marry before living with the person first."  The whole essay is well worth reading, but here are some highlights:

The too-shrewd-by-half Shack-Upper misses this hidden wisdom: Your Christ-like love, and Christ-like faith, would have made the live-in girlfriend you rejected a different person than she was when you rejected her. You reserved the right to cast her aside if you found you didn’t get along, little considering that the annoying habit or temperament that was your deal breaker was the very thing God had in mind for you to help her through.... Unconditional commitment creates a new reality that conditional commitment never can.

That last sentence is worth repeating. "Unconditional commitment creates a new reality that conditional commitment never can."

A little further down, Peterson adds:

The secret to marriage is related to the secret of the meaning of life. If the meaning of life is to find the way of pleasantness and ease, then try out as many partners as you must to find the one who maximizes your happiness quotient. Lots of luck with that.  But what if marriage is for stretching, for no-pain-no-gain advance in maturity, rather than primarily for having one’s desires met?  

Peterson is simply stating, in a slightly different way, some of the same points made by Albert Mohler, Jr., the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in a column I remembered reading a couple of years ago.  Mohler states that the wisdom of marriage is permanence before experience.  After noting that couples who cohabitate prior to marriage have higher rates of divorce than those who do not, Mohler argues:

[Couples who cohabitate] miss the central logic of marriage as an institution of permanence. They miss the essential wisdom of marriage - that the commitment must come before the intimacy, that the vows must come before the shared living, that the wisdom of marriage is its permanence before its experience. Cohabitation weakens marriage - even a cohabiting couple's eventual marriage - because a temporary and transitory commitment always weakens a permanent commitment.

I wouldn't necessarily expect this view of marriage to make sense to a non-Christian.  But as Christians, I think it can be worthwhile to focus not just on the rules that God has set up for us but also on why those rules are for our benefit and protection.  Peterson and Mohler offer an intriguing glimpse of some reasons why God, in His perfect wisdom, set the standards He did for sexual purity and marriage.  As a married man I can say without hesitation that God knew what He was doing when He established marriage and that being married has challenged, stretched, and matured me in ways that nothing else in my life has.