What’s The Point of Making Vows?

Emily Flake, Globe and Mail

A couple of weeks ago I came across an article in the Globe and Mail entitled My Ex-wife and I agree: Divorce Can Be a Sign of Relationship Success. In it, the author argues that despite many people’s belief that his divorce signifies a “failed relationship,” he and his ex-wife agree that “not only was the relationship a success for the decade it lasted, but the fact we ended it at the appropriate time is a sign we are, in fact, quite adept at love.”

The author describes a recent conversation with his ex-wife, in which she told him, “I committed to our marriage with every intent of it being forever . . . Those were the vows we took, and that was my intention.”

“I believed her then,” he says. “But I also knew that my marriage was likely over when she told me one day after dinner: ‘I don’t know any more if we’re going to be together forever.’ . . . She was talking about how she felt right at that moment, just as she did in front of the minister a few years before.”

The author’s take on marriage is clear: you uphold your vows as long as you feel sincere about them. As soon as you no longer “mean” your vows, you have no further obligation to maintain them.

The problem with looking at marriage vows this way, of course, is that it totally misses the point of vows in the first place.

The reason we make vows at all is because we can foresee that a day will come when it will be difficult to do all the things we currently want to do for our lovers. In the ecstasy of new, passionate love, it’s so easy to declare, “I will remain true to you to the end of my days.” It just feels right. Love songs are filled with these kinds of impassioned promises. But it’s harder to enact these promises in the span of a lifetime when kids, illness, money trouble and busyness become everyday issues that you deal with. So you make vows to ensure that you do those things long after the feelings wear off.

If you only needed to uphold your promises of love and fidelity as long as you felt inclined to do so, there would be no point in gathering all your friends and family together to say it in front of them. Fidelity happens naturally when you feel in love. It’s because we need to keep them up when we don’t feel like it that we go through the trouble of holding ceremonies and getting witnesses and signing papers.

A vow that only holds for as long as you feel like keeping it is not really a vow at all.

So I want to say this to the author of that article, and to others who feel the same way: if you don’t plan on taking your vows seriously for life, please don’t bother. Don’t waste your your friends’ and families’  (and priest’s) time. The dress and the cake and the booze and the travel costs are an absolute waste of money.

And what’s more, it makes a liar of you.

As C. S. Lewis points out, marriage and divorce are not just issues of chastity. It’s also about justice – in other words, the keeping of promises. The marriage vow is just like any other oath: breaking it is perjury. To make a promise without intending to keep it is dishonesty. As Lewis writes: “If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another: unchastity is not improved by adding perjury.”

I have had several Christian friends lament that their nonreligious friends refuse to get married, even though they’re in long-term committed relationships. “They’ve been living together for ten years and have two kids together, but they refuse to get married,” they lament.

And I agree that there’s a problem with living like this. Why not make an official promise to remain faithful, especially if you’re already doing it? If you intend to stay together and raise children, I really think you ought to get your community involved and make your intentions clear. It’ll be good for the relationship.

But refusing to get married, in my mind, isn’t nearly as problematic as getting married and then breaking up. Far worse, in my opinion, to make vows and not take them seriously than to not make them at all. Cohabitation isn’t as great an enemy to marriage as unserious marriage vows.

The Globe and Mail article goes on to say this:

When I was discussing this with [my ex-wife] last week, on the two-year anniversary of our split, she did come up with a couple of good parallels, though: “You would never say that was a lousy dinner party last night – everyone left,” she joked. “And when you finish reading a book, you don’t think the book failed because it didn’t go on forever.”

This couple just doesn’t understand. Marriage vows are not the same things as books and dinner parties. No one swears to stay at the party for the rest of their lives or to keep a book going on indefinitely. Everyone involved already knows that the evening or the story are short-term commitments.

Marriage, of course, is a different thing entirely. And it serves a much different purpose.

You make vows about things that are going to be hard and that go against your nature. And maintaining them is important precisely when you stop feeling like it.