Marriage isn't for the faint of heart. It's not always pretty. That part about "for richer or poorer" & "in sickness and in health" is in the vows for a reason! It's Happily Married Husband and Wife Week. If your spouse is still your best friend, works extremely hard, has been with you through triumphs and tragedies, has loved you even when you're at your worst and is someone you're proud to be married to, reply with the date and year you were married.
Sept 14, 1963
I hope this adds to your thread, because I came across this website discussing marriage whilst searching for copies of papers on the views of Akira Morita, a Japanese professor who contributed to a world congress on children and young people some years ago, (he's quoted in the article I'm copying here as you will see).
(apologies, its quite long and involved, and argues against "No fault divorce" amongst other things):
Quote:
"Yenor maintains that both the erstwhile defenders and the attackers of the family shared presuppositions, specifically an overemphasis on narrow understandings of individualism and contractualism as the
sine qua non of marriage. As these notions have manifested themselves in laws and social practices increasingly familiar on the American scene, the process confirms that, indeed, ideas have consequences. These consequence-laden ideas include the contingent nature of marriage codified in the no-fault divorce regime as well as the prevalence of commitment-lite non-marital cohabitation, arrangements in which parties can leave at will without even the legal formalities that still attend divorce. Tragically, the formative ideas of our time also include those making commodities out of children, many of whom—with the abandonment of marriage as the normative prelude to childbearing—are now reduced to the status of a lifestyle choice of adults aided by technological innovations and an accommodating legal system.
Yenor’s proposes a response to this fatal flaw in his closing chapter. He explains: “Defending marriage and family life demands that we expose the intellectual extremism in these partial conceptions of consent.” This means facing squarely what the institution of marriage has become:
Modern advocates of autonomy and personal independence distort the satisfactions of marriage into personal satisfactions. They underestimate how genuinely satisfying marital love creates mutual dependence that limits human autonomy and fail to see how marriage and family life are satisfying because they involve this love and dependence.
Standing in opposition to this reductionist account, the Boise State scholar offers a fuller appreciation for what marriage must entail:
Lovers are dependent on a beloved, and unified family life necessarily entails a range of dependencies. Instead of denying that marriage and family life involve dependencies, I would acknowledge and embrace that reality. Family life entails the dependencies of love. . . . Love is “oppressive” (if that is the right word) or dependency-making; it makes claims on our being; it involves changing our identity; it points to our lack of self-sufficiency. It [the characterization of marriage as oppressive] is false, however, in that love’s chains are neither arbitrary social constructions, nor unchosen,
nor unworthy of choosing. (emphasis added)
Sounding like Jennifer Roback Morse in
Love and Economics (2001), Yenor claims that while “marriage is founded in consent; it forms a loving, mutually dependent relation that
supersedes the point of view of contracts.” Or as F. H. Bradley put it: “Marriage is a contract, a contract to pass out of the sphere of contract.” To the degree that Americans have forgotten this richer understanding and embraced a purely contingent notion of marriage, they have created, according to legal scholar Bruce Hafen, a “waning of belonging” which ignores, in Akira Morita’s words, “the organic correlations between autonomy and dependence, which lies at the heart of human existence.”
http://familyinamerica.org/journals/spring-2012/generals-who-started-war-family/#.X5CMSYhKhPY