Marriage (Part 2)

Technically speaking, married individuals don’t take a “vocation to married life.” Instead, they take a vocation to being married to a specific person. In religious life or holy orders, one makes promises of obedience to a bishop or a religious superior, but rare is the priest who will have the same bishop for the entirety of his vocation.

Those in religious community live together, but don’t typically share rooms, much less beds. In marriage, by contrast, the commitment is to one specific person, bound together until death—meaning at least one of them has signed on to a lifelong commitment—and interconnected on every level with that one person, and no one else.

I’m not going to give a prolonged digression on relational discernment at this point, but suffice to say no one should get married without really thinking about what that degree of commitment means.

Our own culture has regrettably blurred the lines between marriage and dating, specifically when couples pursue intimacy rapidly while delaying the exclusivity and commitment that a healthy intimacy requires. Couples intertwine themselves, their finances, their homes, and even occasionally pets and children, before actually deciding if the other is “the one."

This in turn makes it very difficult to actually discern a marital vocation to that specific person, as inertia and the sunk-cost fallacy lock people into unhealthy relationships. Worse, it creates an underlying culture where marriage isn’t seen as a permanent shift in vocation, but rather just another step in a relationship.

Whatever people think about a priestly vocation, no one would mistake being ordained a priest as just being hired for a new job; it’s a permanent calling and mission, ending only in death. (Even a retired priest is still a priest.) We need to think of marriage in such terms as well.

Challenge: What in your life are you committed to? Is your current behavior strengthening or weakening those commitments?