A recent conversation with the 6-year-old alarmed me. He was sitting on the couch as I folded laundry and out of the blue he burst out, “I think I want to have a child, but I don’t think I’ll get married.”
I tried to answer calmly, “Why not?”
“What if she divorces me?”
So I hugged him, and gave a short, gentle explanation suitable for 6-year-old ears… that God designed marriage for having children, that children need a mom and a dad, that marriage is supposed to be permanent, that Dad and I are never getting a divorce, so in case he was worried, he needn’t be.
Goodness gracious. Here I was thinking that we’ve been able to keep him untouched by the brokenness around him. So much for innocence.
How do you reassure a child that if or when he gets married, his wife won’t divorce him? You can’t, so I didn’t.
Instead we talked a bit about marriage preparation, and getting to know someone really well before marriage, as lightly but as well as I possibly could. One doesn’t always have the proper (customized-to-a-6-year-old brain) words when these things come up, unfortunately.
“But what if SHE’S not prepared?”
“Well, you know how we pray for our children’s vocations and future spouses when we say our Rosaries? If God calls you to get married, don’t worry, we’re praying for her now, so hopefully her family is preparing her well too.”
He finally went back to drawing the cover for his next book. Whew.
In a previous post, I said that my hubby and I eliminated the word “divorce” from our vocabulary early on. Back then, most of the people in our circle still came from intact families. Today, our children are surrounded by those who are products of divorce. Our normal isn’t theirs. So in an age where the permanence of marriage is no longer a given, how do we mentor our kids for it?
We should, of course, continue working on our marriages, and SHOW them what commitment, permanence, stability are all about. How we live our marriage will do so much more for our kids than anything we verbalize, and we need to go much further than simply telling them that marriage is a permanent and indissoluble institution.
My own concept of marriage is perpetually tethered to this one night embedded in my memory, when as a child I woke up in my parents’ bedroom — the family room, a similar practice we continued with our kids until they were ready to move to their own rooms — to conversation at perhaps two in the morning. They were discussing investments, disappointments, plans. Since I was little I didn’t understand much, but what stayed with me was the calmness of it, the respect, the natural flow of thoughts being exchanged, the intimacy… all before I even knew what intimacy was.
Surveys list a seemingly unending list of reasons for divorce. In the past it seems the major reasons were conflicts over the raising of kids, over in-laws, or over money. In more recent years, I’m guessing due to the rise of no-fault divorce, the list has expanded to include almost anything and everything under the sun, and yet looking at these lists, it is easy to see that so many of them can be traced to one main root, and that’s a lack of real intimacy.
What is intimacy? It is a deep KNOWING of the other, and comes from the Latin word intimus, or innermost.
There are close to 1500 instances of the word “know” in the Holy Bible. When the angel Gabriel visited Mary, to announce that she had been chosen to become the Mother of our Savior, her one question was “How can this be, since I don’t know man?” I’m no theologian or philosopher, but I do understand that even in Scripture, the word “know” is sometimes Biblespeak for physical intimacy. But it is also very much tied to certainty and trust, as shown in the other passages. Genesis of course is where we find God’s command with regards to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we all know what happened with that command.
I will leave the deeper analysis to Bible scholars — but I think you’ll agree that we were designed, hardwired, to have this hunger to KNOW, and BE KNOWN. In choosing a spouse, that’s what we ultimately search for: someone to reveal ourselves to, and someone who will reveal themselves to us. So if the desire is God-given and natural, what are we doing wrong? And how does that make a difference in how we prepare our children for the permanence and intimacy of marriage?
More next time.
Love and Marriage Sound So Easy: Where Did We Go Wrong?
The 10 Most Common Reasons People Get Divorced
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