This year about 4 million Americans will make some sort of commitment to each other in marriage. Most of them will fully expect at the time to keep their commitment. But, after a while, about half of them will decide that some private need or desire is more important than that commitment, and will get a divorce.

The shocking spread between wedding commitments and marital mortality suggests at the very least that most of us don’t know what we are doing when we make a commitment for marriage. We marry the wrong person; only the very lucky ever marry exactly the right one. We change; few of us stay the same persons we were when we made the commitment. So in the nature of the case, nobody knows what he or she is doing when making the commitment of marriage.

Obviously we don’t agree on what sort of commitment marriage asks of us. For some people, marriage is a special sort of friendship that entails the same sort of commitment that a friendship does: loyalty for the time being, but not necessarily forever.

We part ways in our society where the commitment to marriage intersects with commitment to friendship. We separate today on the issue of whether marriage lays on married people a moral obligation that binds them to each other permanently, even when the mutual attraction of friendship dies and the personal relationship within the marriage is unrewarding and unfulfilling. For some people, a marriage commitment has the same moral weight as a commitment to friendship: deep loyalty for the time being. For others marriage entails a different sort of commitment than friendship: deep loyalty “until death doth us part.”

The Christian moral tradition teaches us that a marriage commitment is different from a friendship commitment. It is, indeed, a commitment to work at maintaining a certain quality of relationship, but to keep working on the premise that you don’t quit even when the pain is larger than the pleasure.

I want to ask what there is about marriage that obligates us to stick with it even when mutual attraction is dead and when it holds no promise of personal fulfillment in it. Why does marriage pin people down with a moral duty to stay in it even when they stop liking and loving each other? Why are married people stuck forever with what they are stuck with?

Most married people don’t think about commitment much until it is sorely tested. As best I remember, I never gave the word commitment a thought when I got married; I did have a sense that what I was doing was plopping me into a stream I was never to swim away from, but I did not think about it as a commitment.

It is obviously possible to break the commitment and dissolve the marriage by a simple act of will. If it is possible, why is it not permissible?

People who are committed don’t contemplate their commitments much either. We gradually get linked, we get so used to each other that we cannot think of ourselves without thinking of the other also. We may hate each other sometimes, love each other mildly most of the time, but we gradually become each other in a way that leaves us quite crazily incomplete without the other. Being committed does not smack our minds with a moral obligation; it comes more like settling into our destiny, or blessing, as the case may be.

It is when we fear we made a mistake…married the wrong person…like somebody else a lot better…feel skewered into place…trapped, cabin’d, cribbed, confined, it is then that we ask the question of why we are bound to the commitment we made at the beginning.

If we want to know why we are bound to keep this special commitment, we need to ask what sort of commitment it is.

Marriage, as the Bible sees it, is a kind of social order that God created us to live in: married for good even if the marriage is not all that good. The commitment sets two people in an exclusive sexual partnership meant to last as long as both of them live. This seems to be the sort of commitment marriage requires.

Our commitment is the moral mortar that fastens people into what otherwise would be a fragile and unpredictable relationship. Our will, our choice to be committed, creates of our relationship an instance of the abiding alliance God planned for sexual unions.

Some people believe that any bona fide marriage is a metaphysical entity that two people agree to enter, but that exists somehow independent of their wills. When God joins you, they suggest, you are wedlocked behind the walls of the indestructible estate called matrimony, and even if you climb the wall and get out, the estate stays behind and beckons you to come back to it.

Other people believe that marriage is only a close personal relationship, like a friendship only more intimate. Most people want to stay in it once they begin because they believe they will be happier in it than out of it. But once the relationship breaks down, the marriage breaks down with it.

In the former view, one is obligated to keep commitment to a reality called marriage that will continue to exist, in God’s sight, which means in reality, even when the two people who once lived in it are divorced, hate each other, and never look at each other. In the second view, one is obligated to a marriage pretty much as he is obligated to a friendship; the partners should be loyal to each other, but only for the time being, as long as the relationship lasts.

Speaking for myself, I cannot make any sense out of a metaphysical marriage that still exists in God’s sight and summons us back to it after we break out of it.

But on the other hand I believe that marriage has more to it than a commitment to sexually intimate friendship. I believe that it has a more enduring claim on my commitment than a friendship has.

I believe that marriage as such is a social order that God wills to be permanent in each instance. I am obligated, then, by God’s will for marriage to make my marriage endure.

Clear enough. But surely endurance is a grim and foreboding and unreasonable commitment when it comes to a relationship with so much potential for misery.

It seems to me that a marriage commitment is a commitment to the effort of maintaining and improving a quality of personal relationship. Commitment is not simply to the endurance of the institution, but to working at a quality of relationship.

A commitment simply to stick it out gets to be legalistic, oppressive, and sometimes destructive. But a commitment simply to work at the process seems too limited and conditional. One or both partners may too soon say: we’ve worked at it and it isn’t working, so we’re calling it quits. So marriage, unlike friendship, is a commitment to stick with what we are stuck with even if the relational process is stalled in the muck of mutual pain.

Now, then, we are ready to ask why married people should be obligated to keep their commitments to each other no matter what.

There are certainly plausible reasons why they should not be so bound.

One reason is the individual’s autonomy, his or her sovereign right to make a choice. If individual choice is a human value, why eliminate it from marriage? If we have a free choice to marry whom and when we please, why should we not have a free choice to divorce when we please? Why should we not be free to repair mistakes? We change our jobs, we switch our political allegiances, we change our locations, and nobody clucks a moral cluck. Margaret Mead raised the question back in 1949: “If past mistakes are to be reparable in every other field of human relationships, why should marriage be the exception?”¹

Another reason that counts against having to keep our marriage commitments is our entitlement to fulfill ourselves as individuals. It seems reasonable to suppose that individuals are entitled to some personal satisfaction in life. We don’t have to buy into everyone’s entitlement to self-fulfillment and satisfaction to sense that everyone has an entitlement to avoid needless misery and cruelty. Even if no one has an inalienable right to everything his or her heart yearns to be and do, it seems reasonable that everyone has some sort of right to cut his or her losses by leaving a personal relationship that denies her or him a bare minimum of satisfaction with life. If we do not have a right to be perfectly happy, it could be argued that we have a right to put a stop, if we can, to being perfectly miserable.

Why, then, should we continue to impose on married people a commitment so total, so fundamental, that it is a choice to surrender choice? And why should we impose on them a commitment to endurance that takes precedence to their entitlement to at least some satisfaction in life? Why should not marriage have some escape clauses, open windows if not revolving doors? Friendship does. Why not marriage?

Well, one may say, because God says so.

True. But why does God say so? Would he mind too much if we asked him why should he be so stubborn about this special sort of commitment?

I should like to suggest two old-fashioned reasons why commitment to endurance is the guts of a commitment to marriage.

The first reason is that marriage is for families. This is why commitments to marriage need to be kept in spite of persuasive reasons for breaking them. Marriage is for having and caring for children. If married people are free to pack their bags and leave when they are seriously dissatisfied with the marriage, they tend to harm their children. Whether they bring up kids in the uncertainty of a possible divorce or subject them to the pain of actual divorce, they hurt them. And children should at least not be hurt by our provisional commitments.

For me it is very hard to see why commitments to marriage should be unconditional if marriage is essentially about intimacy and love and mutual growth, and only accidentally, as a matter of personal preference, about children.

It is because marriages are about having families that homosexual people do not make commitments to marriage even when they commit themselves to each other with a solemn oath. Even if we agree that committed partnerships are better for gay people than are floating, promiscuous relationships, we only confuse things when we call their commitment partnerships marriages. A marriage and family therapist told me recently that she conducted a marriage encounter weekend for several gay men and women, and she asked me whether I thought she had done right. I told her that I thought she did right to help gay people keep commitments to each other, but that she should not call it a marriage encounter. What committed gay couples seem to have is a friendship trying to be a marriage when it cannot be—a fact which makes most gay alliances very unsteady.

I am not suggesting that people who get married and intend to have no children are not really married. Of course not. I do think people who get married need to have a persuasive reason for not having children, a reason beyond their commitments to careers and/or personal satisfaction. But my limited point here is to say that if they commit themselves to a marriage without children, their commitment lacks an important reason for being a commitment for better or for worse, till death them do part.

There is another reason for keeping commitments to marriage. It has to do with the paradox that individuals find their lasting identity in lasting commitments to others. Marriage is one of those commitments. It adds an ineradicable dimension to our identity. And if we annul this commitment, we fragmentize the stories we are writing with our lives, we let loose of our past and chisel away at who and what we are for the future. We lose a significant part of our own identity, of course, but what is worse, we rob another person of the identity that our commitment promised to her or to him. No wonder that, after a divorce, people are usually bewildered about who and what they are; they have lost or given away a segment of their stories.

I have suggested two practical reasons why commitment to marriage carries an obligation to keep it.

I think commitment-making and keeping are good because important and intrinsic goods are endangered if we do not make and keep them. Two of these goods are: the care of children and the creation of individual identities.

For this reason, it seems to me, marriage commitments are meant to be kept, for good. For good, in the sense of for quality of life. But for good, too, in the sense of for always.

Absolutely? Not quite. Not in a broken world where married persons can become abusive, incestuous, demeaning, adulterous, and generally dangerous to their partners, their children, and themselves. Not absolutely, but close enough to claim again that commitment is the one thing necessary in a culture of free-wheeling search for oneself—a search grounded in the mistaken notion that the primary way to achieve a self is through self-gratification, and that the primary self-creating gratification is gratifying sexual experience.

Our culture is in imminent danger of atomizing itself; individuals are estranged from themselves because of their surrender to the gods of choice and entitlement. We need not absolutize commitment-keeping, but we do well to dedicate ourselves to it, to teaching it, encouraging it, and nurturing it among ourselves.

1. Male and Female (New York: Morrow, 1949), p. 355.

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