|
Printable
Version (PDF 82 KB)
Love and Marriage
Centuries ago,
marriage was an economic necessity for mothers. Romantic love was a bonus.
Marriage has always been more than just wedding the person you love.
Remember Fiddler
on the Roof, where Tevye’s and Golde’s marriage was the product of a
matchmaker arrangement? They first met each other on their wedding day.
There was no prerequisite for romantic love. Twenty-five years later, after
raising a family, they solemnly reflected on their marriage and decided that
they had grown to love each other. “It’s nice to know,” they concluded.1
Romantic love is a powerful compulsion
toward unity of man and woman. When Fraulein Maria and Captain Von Trapp
confirmed their repressed love for each other with that chaste kiss in
The Sound of Music, it inspired the audience to believe that they were
destined for marital bliss.2
However, the strength of their marriage was revealed not by romance, but by
the way they worked together to protect their family while escaping the
dangers of their time and place.
“Love and marriage, go together like a horse and
carriage” is a memorable line sung by Frank Sinatra for the 1955 play Our
Town. “Dad was told by mother, ‘You can’t have one, you can’t have
none, you can’t have one without the other!’”3
It was a charming prohibition of premarital sex. It confirmed the age-old
need for marriage to secure a woman’s legitimate sanctuary where conjugal
expressions of love are socially and economically prepared for the prospect
of pregnancy, birth, and child rearing.
The delightful musical Seven Brides for Seven
Brothers portrayed a “shotgun wedding.”4
Male relatives of the women enforced the obligation of marriage when they
suspected intimate relationships and the prospect of pregnancies. The
“shotgun wedding” assured that economic and social responsibilities for
pregnancy would be met.
Can you imagine any need to impose a “shotgun wedding”
on an intimate “gay” couple? “Same-sex marriage” advocates seem desperate to
claim equal social status for homosexual partnerships and to grasp the legal
rights and benefits of marriage. However, the legal rights and benefits of
marriage are granted in recognition of a bride and groom's capacity to
conceive new human life and in consideration for the legal obligations
incurred by husband and wife to support and rear the offspring of their
sexual union.
A respected friend once defended government licensing
of “same-sex marriages” with his philosophy that “marriage is the greatest
act and symbol of two people loving each other.” None-the-less, you can’t
marry everyone you love. Although love and physical attraction are important
parts of marriage, no license is needed to experience love or to feel
physical attraction. It is the prospect of creating new human life that
warrants a government-issued marriage license.
Golde, Fraulein Maria, Frank Sinatra's
lyrical mother, and the seven brides, all needed the legitimate sanctuary of
marriage. By it they protected themselves, their husbands, and the fruits of
their respective wombs. Their newborn babies inherit the legitimate
birthright of being reared by both their father and their mother. In process
of time the women and their men earn the enduring crown of human family love
in marriage.
|
