Mae West used to quip, "Marriage is a wonderful institution. But who wants to live in an institution?"
         Perhaps, the comedienne from the 1930s and ‘40s was ahead of her time.
         A recent study by the Pew Center has indeed found that many are abandoning the institution of marriage. They found that 40% of those surveyed believe that marriage is becoming "obsolete." That number has increased from 28% in 1978.
         Three factors cited include no-fault divorce laws, the increase in couples living together, and gay marriage.
Marriage has hit hard times in our culture. Yet a good marriage is good for you on every front. It adds to one’s happiness, length of life, quality of life, financial well-being, sexual satisfaction, and so on.
        Anecdotally, I can testify that after three decades of a solid marriage, I am definitely the better for it.
Scientifically, this is true too.
        Two sociologists, Peggy Waite and Maggie Gallagher wrote a classic book on the subject about a decade ago, showing that one virtually every front a good marriage was good for you. Their book is The Case for Marriage. They observe, "The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: Marriage is not just one of a wide variety of alternate family forms or intimate relations, each of which are equally good at promoting the well-being of children or adults. Marriage is not merely a private taste or a private relation; it is an important public good."
        Waite and Gallagher also report something astounding: If you hit a roadblock in your marriage, work at preserving your marital unit. You’ll be rewarded for it. They report, for example, that many married couples that were at the point of getting a divorce, who were about to throw it all over, throw in the towel, the long term impact of their decisions were usually surprising. There was a major difference between those who chose divorce versus those who stuck together and worked things out. Waite and Gallagher report that five years later, those who that went ahead with the divorce, of them, 22 percent were happy. Of those who decided to stick it out, seek help and counseling and try to fix their marriage (which for most seemed probably hopeless), of those people, five years later, 80 percent said they were happy. It’s worth plugging away and working through the pain. If some couples spent as much energy as making their marriage work as they do trying to dissolve their seemingly failed marriages, they would be so much better off.
        So would society. Marriage is the building block of society. Call me old-fashioned, but I really do believe that as the family goes, so goes society.
        That being the case, we seem to be in trouble today.
        Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth Bell Graham, used to joke that she never considered divorce in all her years of marriage. Murder? Yes. Divorce? No. I used to laugh at that remark. Nowadays, I’m not sure if it’s funny. Having watched many episodes of the television program, Snapped, it seems like many individuals have indeed opted for murder rather than divorce. That television program on the Oxygen network features documentary exposes in the true crime genre of ordinary people who snapped and ended up committing murder. It took me watching several episodes to realize that in each case, the woman did it---even if on occasion, she had a male confederate. The program could be retitled to "The Hell Hath No Fury Show," in that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It is not the case in each episode that the couple is married, but it seems to be a common factor. In virtually every episode, there is sex outside of marriage---a contributing factor to someone snapping. That doesn’t mean people who have sex outside of marriage commit murder. If that were the case, there would be far many more murders than there are. But the old-fashioned principle, taught by the Bible, that used to be reinforced by society, still stands. Sex is intended for marriage. Removed from its marital context, it can cause many problems.
        Marriage is worth saving as an institution, despite the onslaught against it, from the media, from the popular culture, and from contemporary society. Marriage forces people to learn how to get a long with each other. It causes many people to become mature in their outlook.
        I have learned that it works best when the man has the final word in any discussion---as long as the final word is, "Yes, dear."