“A good marriage does not require a perfect man or a perfect woman. It only requires a man and a woman committed to strive together toward perfection.” – Elder Oaks
The truth of the matter is that marriage is hard, really hard sometimes. It isn’t the “and they lived happily ever after” that you hear in Disney stories. I don’t want to sound cynical, because I am not, I am actually a big proponent of marriage – just a realistic view on it is all I am offering. My hope is that you don’t give up on marriage when times get hard, and think that you must have married the wrong person if you are not currently happy.
Elder Oaks told us that, “Under the law of the Lord, a marriage, like a human life, is a precious, living thing. If our bodies are sick, we seek to heal them. We do not give up. While there is any prospect of life, we seek healing again and again. The same should be true of our marriages, and if we seek Him, the Lord will help us and heal us.” What a fantastic comparison between a human body being sick and a marriage being sick! Follow Elder Oaks’ counsel to find healing. “If you are already descending into the low state of marriage-in-name-only, please join hands, kneel together, and prayerfully plead for help and the healing power of the Atonement. Your humble and united pleadings will bring you closer to the Lord and to each other and will help you in the hard climb back to marital harmony.”
Why put all this effort and time into marriage you might ask? The National Marriage Project (2012) has found that “Marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex social institution. Marriage fosters small cooperative unions—also known as stable families—that enable children to thrive, shore up communities, and help family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times. Researchers are finding that the disappearance of marriage in Middle America is tracking with the disappearance of the middle class in the same communities, a change that strikes at the heart of the American Dream.”
Keeping families intact should be of national notice, and critical attention. In the self-centered world we live in, with instant gratification, and an “easy” lifestyle (compared to pioneer days) it is no wonder that so many marriages fail. Please don’t think I am criticizing you if you have been divorced, certainly there are circumstances that warrant such action. But as a general public, lack of commitment to marriage is at a crisis level, and public awareness needs to be a high priority. Starting with your immediate circle of influence, be the kind of person to change the world, one family at a time.
Statistics show us that children who come from a divorced family have a lower well-being than children who live with both their biological parents. Bruce Keith and Paul Amato summarized the results of 93 studies and confirmed that “children with divorced parents are worse off than those with continuously married parents on measures of academic success (school grades, scores on standardized achievement tests), conduct (behavior problems, aggression), psychological well-being (depression, distress symptoms), self-esteem, and peer relations, on average. Moreover, children in divorced families tend to have weaker emotional bonds with mothers and fathers than do their peers in two-parents.”
In the end, any two good people can make a marriage work, if they are committed to strive towards protection together.
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