Sacramental marriage is losing ground.

In the last 35 years, the amount of people getting married in a church has dropped 70%, and continues to decline by 5% each year. More and more young couples prefer cohabitation to a church wedding. It seems like marriage is only attractive to homosexuals now!
In our own family, most of our nephews and nieces, and even one of our daughters, have settled for cohabitation. What is their motive? Fear of the life-commitment? Rejection of the Church and institutions in general? Fear of divorce? They can’t even say they want to be different because everybody cohabitates! The ones who are different are the ones who marry.

I want to scream at them that what they reject is exactly what could make them happy; happy beyond anything they could imagine! What they reject is precisely what they long for. They have preconceived ideas about marriage, clichés that are conveyed by our culture. If they only knew what the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony represents. They’re all enthusiastic about superhero movies, special effects defying all natural laws, magic, and the extraordinary, but they don’t know that the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony beats them all!

I feel compelled to write about it, to yell on the rooftops that Christ’s grace is incredibly powerful, efficient in very concrete ways, and the best thing that can ever happen to anyone! I can affirm it because Christian and I experience it daily in our marriage! I want everyone to know that marriage rocks!

Of course, we didn’t know much about marriage either when we said yes on July 2nd, 1977. We didn’t receive any marriage preparation and had been cohabiting for almost three years. Still, we didn’t think cohabiting could be a permanent solution, and we wanted to seal our love in marriage. We wanted to have children, and we instinctively knew that only a Catholic marriage would give our family the solid foundations it would need.

Now, 35 years later, we are in awe at what Christ accomplished in our relationship.
We wrote about the day we met on November 27th, 1974. What we haven’t told you yet, is how broken and wounded we both were, and how we added to our brokenness through our three years of cohabiting.

Me as a girl scout

Christian had lost his mother to cancer just the year before; his girlfriend had aborted their baby without even giving him a choice, a few months later. For me, I was craving to be loved. My year as an exchange student in Indiana had messed my moral and spiritual compass up. Everything I had believed in before Indiana was shaken.
I had dreamt of giving myself only to the one who would be my husband. I had dreamt of strong Catholic values, and even though the dreams were still deep inside me, my actions had twisted everything upside down. This is who we were when we met: two hurt and lost kids! (to be continued).