BreakPoint WorldView » February 2009

We arrived at the Georgetown restaurant at 6:30 p.m., elegantly dressed, ready to celebrate 90 years of wedlock.

No, my husband and I are not a pair of wrinkly 110-year-olds. There were six of us—Jim and Dottie, March and Mariam, and Brent and I. We’d recently discovered that we’d all tied the knot 30 years before, in 1978, and decided to do something about it.

The idea of the 90th anniversary dinner, as we called it, was to celebrate together, eat and drink incredibly good food and wine, and regale one another with stories of how we met, how we knew our beloved was “the one,” and determine which of us had received the nuttiest marriage proposal (Mariam won hands down)

But our dinner had a more serious purpose, as well. We wanted to talk about how we’d managed to stay happily married during an era—the late seventies to the present—when so many other marriages had disintegrated into the tragic dust of divorce.

Three decades. It seems an astonishing length of time to be married, although it was routine just a few decades ago. I tried to find out how many couples who tied the knot in 1978 are still married, but alas, such figures are difficult to come by. So I turned to the United States Marriage Index. As Courtney Newberry, a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling student at Dallas Theological Seminary interpreted the Index, “The percentage of those couples whose marriages were still intact dropped from 76.3% in 1970 to a staggering 58.5% in 2000.” This means that almost half of the couples who tied the knot the same year I did subsequently untied it. Marriage expert J. Lee Jagers, who has thought about this, believes that “perhaps one of the reasons that increasing numbers of people are divorcing, or not getting married in the first place, is because they don’t understand the basic purpose of marriage”. (To which I say: “Amen.” More on that later).

The low, long-term marital survival rate is reflected economically. Mariam and I both threw parties on our 25th anniversaries, and while we found plenty of first, fifth, and 50th anniversary party goods, we found next to nothing for couples celebrating 25 years of matrimony. Apparently there’s little market for this anniversary, and in the end, we both created our own silvered decorations. (They looked sort of middle-aged, just like us).

First, the proposals: Brent and I met at a Seattle church during a Christmas event in 1976. We went caroling at the homes of elderly shut-ins, then stopped at a Dairy Queen for desserts. Brent has never forgotten this detail. On every anniversary, he reminds me that I first ate my own hot fudge sundae, and then attacked his. He proposed to me the following Christmas at Franklin Falls in the Cascade Mountain Range. I was wearing a stocking hat that had been stored in a box with our food, and ketchup had leaked onto my hat. I was not exactly a raving beauty at that moment, I was cold, and I was slightly cranky from being made to hike further up than I’d wanted to. But Brent wanted exactly the right setting: the place where we’d gone on one of our first dates the year before. He proposed; I accepted (and stopped being cranky). We picked out the ring a few days later and married in June of 1978, having dated for 18 months.

Jim and Dottie met at a church in Boston, where they were both engaged in young adult ministry. Both had recently broken engagements to other people, so they were “just buddies” for a long time. Jim was attending seminary; Dottie was attending nursing school. When the two finally began to discuss marriage, their pastor recommended they discuss a long list of subjects during a seven-hour drive to Dottie’s parents’ vacation home in Vermont. They talked on the way up, they talked on the way back: 14 hours of talking.

Back in Boston, they helped a friend move into a new home. Tired and grubby, they went to Burger King for dinner (Dottie treated). What to do for the rest of the evening? “We can go to a movie or we can go out and celebrate if you’ll marry me,” Jim told Dottie. She said “yes,” and they went out for champagne and strawberries.

March and Mariam’s story was by far the best. Both were students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. March proposed one evening while the couple was sitting below the Wittenberg Door—a place where students posted comments on every imaginable subject. (It was a ‘70s version of a blog site).

A policy of love? “I was downright flabbergasted,” Mariam told us. She’d thought she had no particular expectations for a proposal—flowers, dinner, moonlight--but now she realized she was mistaken. This was NOT the way she wanted to be proposed to. In fact, this “policy of love” business sounded downright cold.

When she expressed this view, March defended himself by pointing to 1 Corinthians 13, with its long list of love “policies” beginning with “Love is patient and kind.” His view, March maintained, was the biblical one: Love isn’t about feelings, it’s about commitment. One chooses to love regardless of whether the object of that love is always—well, lovable.

If you think that final comment improved matters, you’re probably a guy. Mariam didn’t care what 1 Corinthians 13 said. “I wanted to hear him say ‘I love you,’ and mean it,” she recalled. She declined March’s proposal, and the two engaged in a protracted battle over the next few weeks before March finally broke down and said the three magic words.

And so, pretty much at the same time, we all began planning our weddings—and we are all happily married today, three decades later. How did we manage it? We discussed that after a waiter, hearing this was a triple anniversary celebration, brought us a little cake with a sparkler on top (which we ate in addition to the pastries we’d already consumed).

Much of our success, we agreed, came down to the view of marriage we brought to the altar. “There really is something to the firm, steady, unshakable belief that marriage is permanent,” Jim noted. “We believed in our commitment to each other.”

Jim and Dottie have also spent 30 years talking to each other and laughing with each other. They’ve made a point of always having meals together. And that stuff about not letting the sun set on your anger? “I couldn’t deal with going to bed angry,” Jim said. If he and Dottie had a fight at 10:45 p.m., they’d stay up to talk it out.

Brent also talked about life-long commitment as key to marital success. Such a commitment to one’s marriage “allows a long-term view of our life together in the midst of difficulties,” he noted. “When you know that you’ll still be together, and still love each other decades from now, it adds a great perspective to your relationship as a couple, even in the midst of a fight. It just makes the current disagreement seem less important than it might if you didn’t have that certainty.”

There’s also the matter of asking forgiveness, and of forgiving. In a committed marriage, this can be done sincerely, rather than out of fear. I try to imagine what it would be like to be merely living with Brent instead of being his wife; I can visualize asking forgiveness even when I don’t think I’ve wronged him, out of fear that he would simply walk out if I didn’t. Maybe that’s not what living together is like, but, given that so many seem to view cohabitation as a kind of audition for marriage, it’s what I imagine it would be like.

Ironically (and amusingly), Mariam credited the 1 Corinthians 13 stuff for keeping her marriage on track. “You really are better off with someone committed to love whether you’re always lovable or not,” she said.

Maintaining a strong marriage is a continuing battle, and not just because of the Fall, she added. The second law of thermodynamics—that things naturally deteriorate over time—applies to marriages: They will rot and fall apart without constant loving care, much like a garden.

Couples must also remember that in marriages, as with everything else, they are fighting Satan—a roaring lion seeking to destroy, Mariam notes.

Neither March nor Mariam have forgotten March’s proposal. Every now than then, when they need to do a better job of, umm, exercising a policy of love—one of them brings it up. And then they laugh.

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I’m thinking about the subject of marriage a lot these days because my older son is thinking of getting engaged. My mother thinks that, at not quite 23, he’s too young to think of choosing a wife. I disagree. Up to a point, I don’t think successful marriages have much to do with age. March and Mariam, Jim and Dottie, and Brent and I were all young by today’s standards, when we tied the knot (age 20 to about age 23). If my son enters matrimony with the same view of marriage we three couples share (which he does), he should be very happy--especially since the lovely young lady he’s picked out views marriage the same way: As a life-long, monogamous commitment, with vows taken before God, and which commit to a life-long honoring of His purposes.

Tragically, this view of marriage seems to be dying, helped along by an intense battle over the definition of marriage itself. Consequently, weddings have become little more than expensive parties, framed by prenups that protect one’s assets if (when?) the marriage breaks down.

Weddings, of course, will never die out; too many businesses, from magazines to caterers to dress designers—the entire Wedding Industrial Complex, as some have described it—have a vested interest in encouraging couples to dream the fantasy and tie the expensive knot. But sadly, for many couples, it’s a slip knot. Weddings may not be dying out, but marriages are—or will, unless we teach our children, by word and example, to embrace the view of marriage that actually binds couples together for life.

That brings me to one of the more memorable details of preparing for my 25th anniversary party. I was attending a cake-sampling event at a bakery that specialized in wedding cakes, and after sampling several different flavored cakes and fillings, I chose the same combination I’d chosen for my original wedding cake: Two white layers and one of chocolate, with one layer of raspberry filling and one of lemon. While paying for the cake, I told the owner her creations were among the best cakes I’d ever tasted. She beamed, and told me, “A lot of people say that. We have a lot of repeat business here when couples get married a second or third time, because they remember how good the cakes are.”

Repeat business? For weddings? Her comment made me wonder how many other businesses eagerly anticipate repeat customers among the brides and grooms they serve.

This is not what parents, particularly Christian ones, want for their children—which is why churches must work hard at teaching their kids what marriage is all about. It’s not about the reception, the toasts, the gifts, or the honeymoon. It’s not about what they see modeled in the wider culture, in television and in movies and in songs. It’s about fidelity and permanence, and a mutual imitation of Christ, as long as you both shall live. It’s about—yes—a policy of love.

****

After our never-to-be-forgotten meal, we divided the (extremely high) bill three ways, and wandered around a bit. And then we bid one another goodnight, hugged, and went home.

Time to start the next 90 years.

Anne Morse is senior writer for BreakPoint. She has been writing and editing BreakPoint commentaries and columns with Chuck Colson since 1993. In 2004, she co-authored with Chuck Colson the How Now Shall We Live? Devotional. In 1997, she and Mr. Colson co-authored an award-winning collection of BreakPoint commentaries called Burden of Truth. Anne contributes to National Review Online, the Weekly Standard, Touchstone, Family Security Matters, Beliefnet, the Independent Women's Forum, and other publications. Anne is married to Capt. Brent Morse of the Public Health Service. The couple has two sons in college, Travis and Trevor.