What Makes a Good Marriage?
The story is told of a wife who baked bread every morning, and she would cut the top half for her husband and eat the bottom half herself. This went on for thirty years. Finally, she felt she should have a taste of the top of the bun which she loved. That morning she gave her husband the bottom half.
He smiled and thanked her saying, “For all these years I ate the top half for you, but I really like the bottom half.” This couple knew the secret of a successful and enduring marriage.
In another story a woman was asked to write the names of the five most important people in her life. She wrote her husband’s name, her parents names, and that of her two children. She was asked to write the names of twenty-five of the next most important persons in her life.
Then she was asked to gradually remove the people from the list. Finally, three names remained. After some tears she removed the names of her children. Asked why she chose this order she replied, “My parents will die eventually, and my children will leave home. Then I will have only my husband.”
In marriage you have a choice to commit for life. On my marriage day I felt absolutely sure of my choice in spouse, and I knew that I would be committed until death do us part. You don’t hope for a successful marriage. You decide. You can hedge your bets with the addition of God’s help and the blessings of the church and community.
A World Wide Marriage Encounter pastor once told me one in two marriages fails. If the couple is married in church and continues to go to church, only one in fifty fails; but where the couple is married in church, continues to go to church and has a prayer life together, the failure is one in 1005.
There is a sadness that attends a separation or the breakup of a marriage. I find myself continuing to pray for the partners, though separated. I still trust that God has a plan that continues to love both parties.
In a reflection “What Makes a Good Marriage?” theologian Ron Rolheiser writes:
* A good marriage is a warm fireplace. The love that the two people have for each other generates a warm place. But the warmth it creates does not just warm the two of them, it also warms everyone else who comes near them.
* A good marriage is a big table, loaded with food and drink. When two people love each other in a true sense, that love becomes a place of hospitality, a table where people come to be fed, figuratively and literally. In a good marriage, love feeds not just the two people who are generating it, …[but] everyone who is fortunate enough to meet it. This is what makes it sacramental.
* A good marriage is a container which holds suffering. An old axiom says: “Everything can be borne if it can be shared!” …the wife and husband, because of their deep moral affinity, can carry not just their own sufferings but also can help carry the sufferings of many others.
* Finally, a good marriage is Christ’s body, flesh that is “food for the life of world.” Christ left us his body to feed the world. A good marriage does precisely that, it feeds everything and everybody around it. This, above all else, is what makes marriage a sacrament.
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