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Category: Relationships / Topics: Faith Family Trends

A Marriage Mirage?

by Dan Seagren

Posted: August 2, 2015

Marriage is taking a real beating…


Marriage ihas been taking a real beating in the late-20th and early-21st century. Makes one wonder if Marriage is a mirage (a misconception or an optical illusion). Looking at it recently here is what some folks have said (without naming names): My husband and I have never considered divorce. Murder sometimes, but never divorce . . .I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury . . . If I get married, I want to be very married.

Going back to the very beginning we have some questions: were Adam and Eve ever married? We don't know. One thing we do know: they were two distinctly different individuals. They were created, not born but before long, two sons were born to them, Cain and Abel, and we know what happened but not exactly why. Poor upbringing? Jealousy? Accidentally? Was it Premeditated? Spontaneous? Unaware of possible consequences?

How much experience did Adam and Eve have? Did they have parents and grandparents as role models? Did they have a marriage handbook? Did their Creator suggest suggestions on reproduction or was it inborn? Did Satan use the power of temptation which the devil had previously mastered? For some reason, the concept of male and female togetherness evolved into matrimony with its implications for union as well as procreation.

Before too long, marriage between a man and a woman expanded into multiple spouses for various reasons as monotheism struggled for supremacy only to find that couples found other ways of kinship. Physical attraction, desire, political alliances magnified by King Solomon but then, his father, King David, didn't set an immaculate example.

Even so, for centuries marriage earned the respect of many tribes and nations, and for centuries it wasn't seriously challenged to make marriage merely a mirage. Why? For one thing, society never found a better way although it has tried. Now, millenniums later, people, including tribes and nations and even religions, cults and sects seemingly think they have succeeded with polygamous unions, common-law couplings, cohabitation, same-sex pairings and non-ritual connections to substitute for marriage between a woman and a man legally and ceremonially united.

As another commented: I never had an impulse to go to the altar . . . Is there a better way? We may have to wait to find out. In 1979, a magazine printed this: Last year over a million couples called it quits, doubling the figures of a decade ago. Should present trends continue, the number of divorces may well reach 1.6 million by 1990. Apparently the divorce rate in the US peaked in 1981 and began to decline after (as did the marriage rate) with couples opting out of marriage and couples marrying at an older age. About 70% of third marriages do not last which is much higher than first marriages.

With trends moving in a downward direction, it does not bode as well for the vitality of matrimony in the future. Hope for a revival of a divinely inspired marital relationship is a spiritual emergence, not a secular issue.AHarvard-trained researcher Shaunti Feldhahn tried in vain to find the actual research showing that divorce within the church is nearly the same as outside. Her eight-year research discovered that the divorce rate is much lower especially among those who attended church regularly.



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Dan Seagren is an active retiree whose writings reflect his life as a Pastor, author of several books, and service as a Chaplain in a Covenant Retirement Community.

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Posted: August 2, 2015   Accessed 249 times

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