Don't get confused, I'll erode your belief in marriage in a second. God's first, though.
Faith is a funny thing. It's basically the belief in a certain reality, no matter what the evidence is. In the case of God, for example, it is the belief that God exists, regardless of what unified theory in thus-and-such the atom smasher reveals to us. God exists, period.
The thing is that faith only seems to work with subjects whose existence is as impossible to prove as their lack of existence, like God. If something can be definitively here, then faith in that thing is flawed; just as it is definitively here today, it can be definitively gone tomorrow.
Which brings us to faith in love everlasting, which today apparently means marriage.
I'd like to tell you a story about friend of mine, a man who will remain a nameless example out of respect for his privacy. When he was 22, he was a clinical psychiatrist bombing around Boston in a new sports car. He had a solid coke habit and had just married his shrink, a woman 10 years his senior.
A few years later he came to his senses, he says, and his relationship with his wife, cocaine and clinical psychiatry (which he had come to regard as pseudo-science and horse-feathers) ended. He moved on.
A few years later he met another woman, a social worker, and after a little while married her and had a kid. He got his doctorate from Cornell in Chemistry and fielded offers for high paying jobs from chemical companies.
Then his marriage ended. He'd never really been in love with his wife, but he thought he was.
He took some time. Then he got married again, this time to a woman he met through a friend. This relationship looks pretty solid. He met his wife when he was in his mid-forties, after a lifetime of maturation.
Deep love between two people lasts forever. But tell me honestly that you're the same person you were three years ago, and I'll call you a liar. You ever have someone tell you that they've outgrown you? They aren't callous, they're honest.
Marriage grew in large part out of a fear of sexuality. How best to curtail sex? Tell folks it's not OK unless they're married.
Well, I have a penis and I'm a fan of vagina, and as far as marriage goes, my eyes are open. I'm too young, you're too young, so is your friend, and I'm right, you're wrong.
See, people change a lot over the course of a life, in ways they can't expect. What if I marry someone at 22 and at 32 I realize I've grown into someone who doesn't love his wife anymore? There's no joking about the anguish that that could cause. Imagine if I had children and had to put them through a divorce.
I find it appallingly stupid when a people get married in their early 20s. It can do nothing but hinder their maturation. But what am I supposed to tell all the children who think they're in love to do? I need a decree!
Oh, I know.
LIVE TOGETHER, YOU IDIOTS! I mean, good lord, is this really that hard? Let's take it through the whole chain of events, here. You were someone else three years ago. Now you're you. You fall in love. Somehow you imagine that you're stable enough as a person that you can weld yourself to another human being for the rest of your life with no consequence. Instead the rationality fairy smacks you with the cricket bat of logic and you get an apartment together to see how it works.
Then one of two things happens. Either it all goes belly-up and the relationship falls apart and all parties learn something, OR - you stay together without having to. You grow. You learn. You change. You find, after a while, that you've been pretty constant as a person for a while, and you still love your significant other. One day you get married to the person you want to die with, and it feels like you're signing a piece of paper that's telling you something you've known for decades: You're in love.
This is your life, children. Take some time to get it right. Don't be afraid of living in sin. And don't think that a piece of paper will save your love when it starts to die.
An addendum: Those of you in relationships should try this Valentine's Day to understand that we single folks aren't bitter because we're lonely, we're bitter because you twits keep making us feel inferior because we aren't, at the moment, in love. So if you get cold-cocked by a solo-flier this Saturday, you have only your patronizing made-up holiday to blame.
