Marriage
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Do the laundry
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Give her a back massage
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Get the kids ready for Mass
Relational Fresh Air
If on your Wedding Day you expected your marriage to be full of positive emotions and the warm fuzzies, you may by now have found yourself disappointed. Emotions are ephemeral, but love is not. When things get a bit chilly in your marriage, sometimes all you need is a bit of relational fresh air. My favorite part about spring is being able to open the windows. After a season of a closed up house, there’s something really refreshing about a gentle breeze whipping through the halls of our home. Everything feels better and I feel more motivated to get things done. At times, you need the breath of fresh air in your marriage.
Attitude is everything. You can choose to let something that your wife does bother you, or you can let it roll off of your back. Are you caring towards your wife? Are you serving? Marriage is all about giving and not at all about taking. Give, give, give until there’s nothing left… then give a little more. As you give more of yourself away, whether it be giving of your time, effort, energy, or self, you find yourself becoming more full. This doesn’t work if you’re only giving in order to get, but if you do everything sacrificially, you’ll find your tanks topped off and even overflowing.
Yet, over the course of a 30, 40, 50, or even a 60 year marriage, rough patches are to be expected. Stress creeps in, fear creeps in, maybe even a little resentment creeps into your marriage. All of these scenarios, though quite normal, actually stem from a selfish attitude. When you stop trusting your wife to take care of you, when you forget that you are one, when you start to turn inward, that’s when external forces start to negatively affect your marriage. In the times when you notice things getting a bit stale, do two things. First, recognize that you’ve turned too far inward and begin to focus your attention and service outward, towards your wife. Be aggressive in finding opportunities to serve her. Second, sit down with your wife and clear the air. Agree to a reset, forgive past mistakes, and push forward.
When your marriage is uncomfortable and things are difficult, the best reaction is positive action. Put all of your focus on your wife and things will work themselves out.
How to Allocate Charitable Dollars
I love the hum of the mail truck. Although we live on a busy street, there’s a particular sound that the mail truck makes as it rumbles down the road. It’s a low hum combined with short bursts of acceleration as it moves from box to box. Even if I’m in the back of the house, I can usually hear when the mail has arrived in the early afternoon. Several days a week, our mailbox is filled with charitable solicitations. In the Christmas season, it gets even more intense. I don’t mind receiving these mailings and we give each request due consideration.
Alison and I have found a model of allocating charitable dollars that works for us. Essentially our guiding principle is that we need to be intentional with every dollar. That intentionality makes the whole giving process a lot of fun.
There are two strategies when it comes to making charitable contributions: share the wealth and big splash. A share the wealth strategy is when your family makes small donations to many organizations. The dollars that you’ve earmarked for giving are spread among numerous organizations and causes. The big splash approach is when you make bigger donations to fewer organizations. Your family isn’t involved in a wide variety of causes, but rather is helping in a more significant way one or two causes that are tightly aligned with your values. Neither approach is better than the other, but I’ll bet that your family falls into one of the two approaches.
We have a moral duty to manage our charitable dollars well. When we make a donation, we have to ensure that the money will do the most good. That means that research should be done before any contribution is made to ensure that dollars end up in the form of resources distributed to beneficiaries and not entirely in marketing. Certainly nonprofits need to spend a percentage of gifts on things necessary for smooth and growing reach, such as salaries, office supplies, and mailings. However, a careful balance must be struck in order for an organization to be worthy of your money.
It’s best to have some rules for allocation. Identify the types of causes that your family will support, perhaps 3-5, and only give to organizations working in those causes, with few exceptions. You can also have rules that help you to vet organizations, such as political action, operating budgets, leadership, and 3rd party ratings. There are countless charities, with new ones being started every day, and a simple set of rules will help you filter through to the organizations that you really can get behind.
Giving is one of the most fun things that you can do with money and I’m always excited when Alison and I start writing checks in our budget committee meeting. Have some ground rules in place to make sure that your charitable dollars help the most people.
Book Review: Marriage
Last December, during one of our regular visits to my parent’s house, my dad handed me a book of his to read. This happens from time to time; a book that he got a great deal out of will end up in my temporary library to enjoy. Since I’ve committed to a habit of regular reading this year, my book queue is able to take on these random offerings. The latest book he recommended to me was What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense by Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George. Published in 2012, Drs. Anderson, George, and doctoral candidate Girgis lay out a reasoned, logical, and thoughtful argument for what has been termed “traditional marriage,” for the sake of this article and blog, we’ll just call it marriage.
Reading this book, I was profoundly struck by many aspects of the work, from the approach to the solid logic. In 97 pages, these authors succinctly laid out a defense of marriage without any dependance on any particular religion, rather, by relying on philosophy, logic, and social science. Unlike most of the “arguments” on marriage today and the op-eds with pseudo-logical arguments that devolve into nothing more than attacks ad hominem, against the man, What is Marriage? refuses to lower itself to this new low of public discourse. Instead, the work argues for marriage against all attempts to revise its definition, not merely against any one person or revisionist viewpoint.
The authors point out one of the reasons why it seems that arguments for marriage are much weaker to the public than those arguing for a revisionist view of marriage. Astoundingly, marriage can be found in every culture in an almost identical framework, regardless of religion or political structure of a society and culture. As such, there hasn’t been a need, even until the past three decades of the human experience, to develop a cogent argument for it’s benefits since they were completely self-evident. Marriage provided stability for children, growth for society, and pressure for men to help with the raising of children they have begotten. However, as challenges to marriage have recently arisen, the need to articulate the unique properties of marriage has become urgent.
This book isn’t about same-sex “marriage.” In fact, it spends almost no time at all discussing the issue. Instead, as the title suggests, it reviews the basic question of “What is Marriage?” It goes over the fundamental aspects of what makes a marriage, including the organic bodily union (sex), its permanence as a stabilizing factor, and a complete rejection of the notion that marriage is based solely on intensity of emotion. It also views the consequences of a legal implementation of a revisionist view of marriage which eerily mirrors the warnings of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae against contraception, all of which have come to pass.
While this book provides the most cogent and well researched argument for marriage, on either side of the issue, I found that it isn’t simply a scholarly work designed to rebuff poor logic. Reading it, I found myself inspired in my vocation and further in awe of the Sacramental marriage that I entered into with Alison. I saw my role as husband and father to be more unique and more sublime. By examining the philosophical underpinnings of marriage, and relating them to the experiences of people in every culture throughout time, I found a deeper sense of satisfaction as being a part of the institution of marriage. I better understood my role in society and the value of the support that I lend to Alison in raising Benedict.
What Is Marriage? is about more than defending an argument, it’s about affirming and educating married people. It helps us to more deeply understand what our marriage truly is, why the organic bodily union is so important, and how we’re helping to build our society. It will also help you teach your kids why marriage is different and what it takes to have a great marriage.
I highly recommend you pick up a copy of What is Marriage? This book will affirm you, it will inform you, and it will help you grow in your marriage. Sadly, we’ve stopped putting a premium on logic in debate, but this book will show you how rich and powerful sound logic can truly be.
3 Ways to Pamper Your Wife this Weekend
Weekends are a great time for some TLC. After a long week, often spent apart, the weekends afford us down time to spend as we please with our family. Hopefully you spend most of the weekend with your wife by working together on chores and projects, having a date night, or even something as simple as being in the same room together. The weekend is also a great opportunity to pamper your wife.
Pampering your wife really isn’t a new idea on this blog. We’ve gone over plenty of ways to treat your wife with the tenderness and affection that she so richly deserves. Yet, life can very easily squeeze the time and energy out of us, leaving the pampering on a “someday, maybe” list. Consider this a gentle reminder that showing your wife your love and affection needs to be on a priority list for today, not on a list that you’ll probably never get around to. With that in mind, here are three simple things you can do to really take care of your wife this week. She’s going to love this.
That’s it. In total, you’ll probably spend no more than an hour of your weekend (that’s 1/48th or .021% of your weekend) on these three things, but the investment will pay dividends. Taking good care of your wife is as much about her as it is about you. Humbling ourselves to give up our precious time for the sake of our wives reminds us that she’s a gift to us. It also reminds us of our universal call to love her as Christ loved the Church.
Take a look at your schedule this weekend, free up some time, and pamper your wife. You’ll both be glad that you did.
Valentine’s Day Isn’t Over
I made a huge mistake last year. In honor of Alison’s birthday, I coordinated among our family to give her an awesome present: her own coffee bar. She was getting ready to begin practicing medicine and I knew two things: Alison loves coffee and physicians need coffee. We got her an espresso machine, a wall-mounted coffee bar, coffee, and everything else that she’d need to have her very own, very fun coffee bar. Then I made a bonehead move. The excitement and anticipation overwhelmed me and I had her open all of her presents before her birthday. Her big day came, and there was nothing left. Whomp.
Each day is a new opportunity to show your wife your love and affection. While Valentine’s Day has long since passed, it’s anything but over.
There are two types of opportunity in our life: given and created. Given opportunities are ones that her actions or needs make known. She has a sore throat, so you make a special trip out to get her throat lozenges. She always likes to have water on her nightstand, so you get it for her each night. There are also given opportunities when you can change the outcome of a situation, like not escalating a fight. Created opportunities are ones that you yourself make into reality. These are quick wins and are often small acts of love. Cleaning the house, putting the kids to bed, serving her at dinner. All of these created opportunities are ones that aren’t needs, per se, but are still chances to show love and affection.
Your marriage is a delicate garden that needs constant supervision and love in order to avoid becoming overgrown. Your wife needs romance daily, not just one day per year. I’m talking about real romance, not sexual romance. Women put a premium on connectedness and daily romance is highly prized in your wife’s mind. It could take the form of a sit-down dinner, a nice hug, or even cuddling. These things do take time, and as men, we can always find new ways to maximize our time. Time spent on romance isn’t about value, it’s about investment. We invest time in our marriage and then mutually reap the benefits.
Signs of love renew our wedding vows. Of course, sex renews our vows most completely, but other, lesser acts, still achieve some small part. Time, acts of service, physical contact, and quality communication all bring a breath of fresh air into your marriage and with it, happiness and fidelity.
Valentine’s Day is a great starting point, and it’s impossible to live every day with that level of intensity. However, every day we should be in the mindset of Valentine’s Day. We love, we serve, and we demonstrate our affection. Through daily opportunities, both given and created, you can have the quality marriage that both you and your wife deserve.
Humility in Marriage
Marriage is unlike anything else in our world. It’s a relationship that cannot be fully comprehended without entering into one, and its many layers make it a lifetime effort of discovery. As is normal for human behavior, we try to compare marriage to a relationship that we do understand, bending it to fit into a reality that we can comprehend. The result is error, confusion, and misunderstanding. We often treat marriage like a business transaction, but marriage isn’t a joint venture or partnership.
Marriage requires the sort of humility that doesn’t demand preference, credit, or glory. Marriage requires that both spouses give up their selfishness, sacrifice for the good of the other, and act in ways that foster harmony. No other relationship demands this level of mutual sacrifice. No other relationship can reach this depth.
When we compare marriage to a business transaction, we misunderstand the fundamentals of what marriage is. In business, one must look out for oneself. There’s plenty of marketing, posturing, and the occasional crushing of a rival through scorched earth tactics. Conversely, in marriage, you look out for others before you look out for yourself. The relationship is not about what one can gain, but how one can serve their spouse in a way that helps them to grow and have a better life. While ethical businesses can, and do, survive and thrive, there’s always an element of looking over one’s shoulder at the competition. The permanence and safety of marriage allows spouses to always look to the other without fear of betrayal.
Humility is the essential ingredient in a healthy marriage. Pride builds oneself up at the expense of another. It may not cause direct harm to someone else, but it does have an opportunity cost, funneling resources away from others to oneself. In a marriage laced with humility, everything is done out of love, not in search of credit or glory. Things are done because they’re right, beautiful, and loving. This reality, when lived and fully experienced, is sublime. This type of behavior goes against our fundamental human inclinations, rejects selfishness, and serves the greater good. When one spouse is able to achieve this level of humility, their marriage can’t help but grow. When both spouses reach this level, their marriage becomes utterly and completely boundless.
It’s wise not to be naive about achieving these levels of marital success and humility. Denying yourself and retraining your brain to resist selfishness is a lifelong process. Our humanity is strongly programmed into our decision making and it will prove a challenge to overcome. Yet, it is possible. As you try to grow in humility and charity, especially in your marriage, remember these truths:
• Great teams aren’t made overnight. It takes years of training to make a championship team. Great teams also don’t fail overnight. When a championship team enters the new season, they aren’t likely to end up in last place. But over time, without careful attention, they can fail.
• Expect lots of failures along the way. Leave your past in the past, but let it form and inform your present. By that I mean to understand how you’ve failed in the past, but don’t dwell on it.
• Leave your pride at the door. It doesn’t matter who’s right, who’s to blame, or who isn’t pulling their weight. Give as much grace as you expect to receive.
Marriage is a beautiful garden that requires attentiveness, care, and loving labor. Through time and discipline, you can overcome your innate selfishness, pour your whole self into loving your wife and together reap a bountiful harvest of love, peace, and serenity.
Complex Sexual Histories
Recently, I’ve been considering the role of men in the family life. It’s a complex issue, and one that no longer has consensus among the masses. In a sense, we’ve forgotten how men should behave and interact with their families. There are many men who want to be good husbands and fathers, but these men find few clues as to how to do it properly. There are also many men who wish to pursue their own desires before being the husband and father that they ought to be, and there are few societal pressures to push them back in the right direction.
As we continue to track towards extreme sexual liberation and rugged individualism, our children are going to face a crippling decision when seeking out a spouse. They will have to untangle extremely complex sexual histories and decide if they can marry someone who has not lived a chaste life. There will always be a certain percentage of young people who will remain chaste before marriage. These young people may have chosen to for religious reasons, out of obedience to the instruction that they had been given by their parents, or out of fear of contracting sexually transmitted infections or becoming pregnant. Although their reasons are varied, they still reach the same conclusion, that sex is reserved for the married state.
Regardless of their reasons and motivations, these chaste young adults may have difficulty finding a spouse who espoused a similar ideal during their teenage and young adult years. Public Health policy and social policies are promoting sexual activity among teenagers by presenting treatments, certain vaccines, and contraceptives as ways of preventing STIs and pregnancy. The real damage of these policies is that, combined with young people’s illusions of invincibility, they remove all objections to having sex and, as a result, kids are engaging in sex at higher rates. These young people don’t have informed consent because they haven’t been presented with the full picture, including the rate of failure of contraceptives and the psychological effects of engaging in sex. In fact, according to clinical studies, 16% of young women will become pregnant in their first year of oral contraceptive pill use. While some teens and young adults will remain chaste, a larger portion will not.
The question then becomes, for those who remained chaste, does an active sexual lifestyle automatically disqualify a future potential spouse? On the one hand, if a person was sexually active in high school, but has abstained since, does that make it a “forgive and forget” the mistakes of youth situation? Or does it demonstrate the moral character of an individual? How do we balance our Christian beliefs of forgiveness with the reality of the consequences of a sexually active lifestyle outside of the married life?
It’s a challenging issue, that’s for certain, and one that I don’t have the answer to. As parents, however, it underscores the importance helping our children understand their sexuality and its proper use. It underscores the importance of helping our kids make good choices and to understand fully the issue of human sexuality. They need to know the beauty of sex expressed in the proper context, the illusion and posturing that their sexually active classmates are projecting, and the medical realities of sex. They need to understand the whole picture by being given fact, not fiction. The pragmatic bottom line is that if a teenager or young adult isn’t ready to be a parent, then they’re not ready for sex. The true bottom line is that a teenager or young adult needs to preserve their chastity not only because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s the loving thing to do.
Parenting is evolving daily, and if we shy away from discussing the hard topics with our kids, we do them a real disservice. Not only will their decision making abilities be compromised, they’ll learn morality from their peers who are no more an authority on the subject than they are.
Stop Joking About Marriage
A few weeks ago, I was getting my hair cut. The barber asked what I did, and I told him that I’m a writer and that I write about Christian marriage. The resulting conversation was about his experience of the married life and the times when he really screwed up. I enjoyed our conversation, but I was a bit uncomfortable with the jokes that he was sharing. I love humor and use it in almost every situation, but, in my opinion, jokes about marriage tend to be more damaging than funny.
Humor is a good thing and it’s essential for a happy life. It’s important for us to be able to laugh at ourselves and to find the bright spots in any situation. Bringing levity to serious situations can help us make it through the day. At the same time, humor tends to influence beliefs. A large segment of the young adult demographic get their news solely from satire TV shows. While comedians can put a fun spin on the day’s stories, if you only get your news from these types of programs, your view of the world is seriously distorted. Without any conflicting information, you might believe that the jokes made about politics, religion, or any other topic covered are fact. Jokes about marriage are potentially just as damaging.
It’s wrong to share jokes that falsely portray marriage. Consider the audience of these jokes; they’re usually kids or unwed adults. Without perspective, like those who get their news solely from satire, these audiences will form poor opinions about the married life or how marriage works based on the lie of the joke. Even worse, marriage jokes tend to either make your wife look bad or make you look spineless. The hyperbole of these jokes is what’s incredibly damaging. You aren’t “always broke,” your wife isn’t “always right,” and she isn’t spending all of “your” money. These jokes aren’t funny, they’re thoughtless.
There’s plenty to joke about in the married life that doesn’t perpetuate false notions. We can laugh about mistakes, awkward situations, burnt dinners or any other number of things. However, when you cross the line into mocking relational dynamics or about aspects that are categorically false, especially to audiences with no alternative information, you do a real disservice to your marriage and to the institution.
Humor is a great thing, but like any other form of verbal communication, think before you speak.
Nip Problems in the Bud
We all have a bit of a flair for the dramatic. While we may despise personal conflict, we’re a bit partial to the excitement and the unknown that the drama incites. There are endless reality TV shows based solely on the generation of drama. Drama is entertaining.
It certainly may be entertaining on TV, but drama in your marriage is poison. Drama, by its very nature, turns people against one another. It demands that someone be blamed, that the fault rests with a single person and that retaliation is justified. The problem is that without a dose of maturity, drama offers no exit plan. Instead, it promotes a cycle of blame, mistrust, and broken relationship. Marriages can be quickly degraded if drama is allowed to take root. The best weapons against drama are transparency and open communication.
Even the most compatible marital partners will have conflict. There’s no getting around the fact that despite numerous areas of similarity, you are both two different people. Not only is it unrealistic to expect to have a no conflict marriage, it can set inappropriate expectations. Life happens. Instead of aiming for an impossible “no conflict marriage,” you should work together to foster a “low conflict marriage.” Not only will you both be more satisfied in your relationship, your kids will also have a healthier, more stable childhood. This low conflict marriage can be achieved by having open communication in your relationship. Open communication fosters a community of love and respect where everyone feels safe expressing their feelings and working them out. It’s only when spouses don’t share their thoughts, feelings, and emotions on a particular topic that drama is able to take root.
Your best offense against drama and the destruction it can bring into your relationship is to keep yourself from going to dark places in your mind. Whenever I’m in conflict, be it with a company or an individual, I play out various scenarios in my mind. In these scenarios, I stage mock arguments and see if I can determine which argument is the strongest. In most cases, the conflict in my mind leads to endless escalation. When the conversations play out in the real world, they tend to be much milder and, frankly, go better. Our minds are creative, but if we don’t keep them in check, they’ll gain too great of a role in our decision making process. Express yourself in conversations and be bold enough to share your feelings, but never retreat into the darkness of your mind. You’ll find that your anger and resentment will grow to unhealthy levels.
The best approach to maintaining a low stress marriage is to manage conflict immediately. Never let it go on for days, festering, eating away at the fringes of your marital relationship. Have the courage to nip problems in the bud by talking openly and honestly with your wife and working through your problems instead of running away from them.
Intent Matters in Sex
One of the best books on the argument for marriage the way that we understand it is What is Marriage?: A Man and Woman: A Defense by Ryan Anderson, Robert George, and Sherif Girgis. I’ll review the book in a later post, but in the work, the authors systematically lay out the foundation for the conjugal view of marriage. Namely, that marriage isn’t based on emotions, but rather on a mutual desire to express love in such a way that it flows out from the couple and into children. Along the course of the argument, the material touched on some auxiliary issues, including the intent required during sex. Wrongful intent in a sexual relationship, even wrongful intent held by a married person, can reduce sex to a lie or a tool.
Sex is an organic bodily union. The male and female reproductive systems carry out their own processes individually, but it’s only through the combination of the two systems, through sex, that either is able to complete the reproductive cycle. While sex unites and binds the two people into one bodily system, it does more than simply complete a process. Sex unites both the body and the mind. Bodily systems do not think or act independently, they must be directed by the mind and by the heart. So when a couple has sex, their minds and hearts direct their reproductive systems to work towards a common good, namely, the creation of new life and the strengthening of the marital union. The fact that every sexual act doesn’t achieve procreation is irrelevant. What is relevant is the intent of each spouse. The right intent is enough to achieve the good regardless of whether or not reproduction itself is achieved.
The intent of one spouse can denigrate or destroy the organic bodily union. In order to perfectly achieve the design of sex, both partners must be willing the good of the other, not simply attempting to achieve one’s own maximum pleasure. When one spouse withholds emotionally or mentally, the act is diminished. The bodily systems function in the same way, but the wrongful intent reduces the sublime nature of the organic bodily union to simply checking off a box or completing a process. Even more egregious is that wrongful intent reduces the opposite spouse to an object, a means to achieve a singularly pleasurable end. Wrongful intent divides the heart and diverts precious resources away from the marital good and to a selfish objective.
Procreation as an end is good, but again, it’s not required. There is a great deal of confusion about the Church’s teaching which has driven scores of Catholics into the arms of the contraceptive culture. Think of it this way. If sex’s only objective was the creation of new life, why would the female reproductive system only be able to achieve pregnancy a few days in a cycle? By looking to the natural order, unimpeded by contraceptives, we can discern that sex is about more than procreation. The natural order tells us that sex is also unitive.
Certainly removing the procreative aspect of sexuality is just as damaging as removing the unitive aspect. Sex and intent towards sex should respect both spouses, should be used responsibly in the creation of new life, and should always be prepared to lovingly and openly accept any children that may come about from the sexual act.
A responsible couple practicing the discipline of natural family planning is able to balance the unitive needs of the couple and the responsibility of parenting. Sex should be a regular occurrence in a healthy marriage because it binds spouses together in ways that nothing else can. At the same time, recognizing the grave responsibility of raising a child, natural family planning empowers a couple to make judicious and just decisions about when to attempt to achieve a pregnancy. By doing nothing more than observing and working with the wife’s reproductive system, a couple is able to appropriately, morally, and intentionally seek to create new life when their family is able to support new life, and abstain from sex when they are not. A key foundational principle of natural family planning is the understanding that, despite the scientifically valid data proving natural family planning to be effective, like contraceptives, it’s practice is susceptible to human error, meaning that pregnancy can still occur. The difference between contraceptives failing and natural family planning failing is in how the couple reacts. A contraceptive mindset leads to an intent that seeks to immediately destroy the life that was just created while a natural family planning mindset leads to an overwhelming joy and excitement about the child who in just a few months will be welcomed into the home.
The Church is the last remaining institution that celebrates and promotes true freedom. By helping us to understand the importance of the conjugal view of marriage and the right attitudes about sex, She encourages us to experience true freedom. We are not to be prisoners to our own minds and passions nor are we to be enslaved to the dire side effects of contraceptives. Instead, we are to experience the true beauty of the married life, and, if in accord with God’s Will, the joys of parenting.