When Marriage Becomes a Private Matter

My wife and I recently celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Planning how we would mark the occasion was left to my discretion. Maybe I should have taken her on a vacation—a second honeymoon of sorts. Instead, I planned a gathering of a few dozen friends at our house. Perhaps I’m cheap, but one of the key reasons I did so is that I think of our marriage as a public thing, even if few people actually know the inner workings of our marital life.

Our marriage is an entity with ramifications and consequences that echo outside our home. The same is true in reverse: what happens in other marriages can affect ours. A marriage needs friends, and it can likewise supply friendship to others’ unions.

It matters profoundly whether a society understands marriage as a public concern or merely a private matter. Yet few Christians spend much time thinking about whether marriage is fundamentally public or private. Young adult Christians tend to consider marriage a private matter (with some public manifestations). The wedding is a public event, but the marriage itself is considered nobody’s business. Decisions to divorce are private, though they entail public legal filings, and declarations, social shifts in relationship status, the creation of distinct households, etc. Westerners in general tend to minimize these public aspects of divorce, expecting little to no objection from others. Most do not share the perspective of Jessica—a thirty-one-year-old engaged Catholic from Austin—who imagines marriage as creating circles that ripple out “to the extended family, to the community, to the nation, and to the entire society.”

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