What really threatens marriage?

As social conservatives work to "defend marriage," perhaps it's time to consider whether the biggest threat isn't direct challenges to traditional marriage. Perhaps the biggest threat is the slow erosion of what marriage means. Last Monday, Dale Price at Dyspeptic Mutterings posted a link to a Fox news report that highlighted that erosion.

The Fox news article by Jennifer D'Angelo carried the headline ''Til Death Do Us Part' Is Dying Out." She reported,

In some weddings, "'til death do us part" is going the way of "to honor and obey" --— that is, out the window.
Vows like ... "For as long as our love shall last" and "Until our time together is over" are increasingly replacing the traditional to-the-grave vow...

And D'Angelo's article shows why this is a problem

Psychologist Diana Kirschner, author of "Opening Love's Door: The Seven Lessons," agreed ... promising forever lets the other person know that you're in it for life --— good times and bad --— and that promising just for awhile can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Over time your mate brings out the best in you, but also the worst in you. You have to have a contract that you'll work together to help each other grow. A contract that is this kind of thing -- —as long as we feel good --— there's a guarantee that you'll feel bad, hit a rocky point, where you don't love anyone, you don't love yourself --— that's where the rubber meets the road. That's where active love comes through."

Ironically, a defender of these new vows sees clearly the problem they cause. D'Angelo quotes

The Rev. Bonnie Nixon, a non-denominational minister in Torrance, Calif., who presides over approximately 1,000 weddings a year...

"...At least half of the couples we marry come from blended families --— some say vows to the other person's children. This generation (the one now marrying for the first time) grew up with a lot of divorce in the '70s and '80s. They have two dads, two moms, eight grandparents...."

What a confusing and uncertain environment in which children grow up today!

Marriage for "as long as we both shall live" or "until death us do part" (pick your tradition) was and is not primarily about the husband and wife. It's about family and children. The stable network of relationships in the family -- immediate and extended -- provides a secure place for children to begin to develop a healthy identity.

In Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson wrote a child's ego development begins with a basic sense of trust, what others called a sense of confidence.

The infant's first social achievement, then, is his willingness to to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. Such consistency, continuity, and sameness of experience provide a rudimentary sense of ego identity which depends, I think, on the recognition that there is an inner population of remembered and anticipated sensations and images which are firmly correlated with the outer population of familiar and predictable things and people.

These days, though, those familiar people are increasingly unpredictable. Parents devoted and focused on the care of a few children are being replaced by an ever changing network of care givers responsible for much larger numbers of children. And we're now beginning to understand just what negative consequences this is having as those children develop.

Jeff Miller at The Curt Jester puts it this way:

Being the product of a divorced family I know from personal experience the tragedy of this view of marriage on children. I wonder what children of couples that take such phony vows must think? Each day they might wake up wondering if there parents had still "continue to love each other" or whether their parents might be moving on. They must also reason that if their parents can stop loving each other than they also can stop loving them.