A Man’s Guide to Marriage

Your greatest mission

Marriage no longer strikes men as a mission. Among secular people, it’s so meaningless that many men don’t see that it offers anything more that playing house with a girlfriend does. And marriage is poorly understood even among Christians — a vague kind of contract that confers some small measure of social respectability on two people of the opposite sex wanting to live and “adult” together, whatever that means.

In reality, however, it’s not a mere contract but also a Sacrament, and it presents men with a mission that’s the greatest test of their masculinity. In his marriage, each man can truly leave a legacy that echoes in eternity. And the opportunity to do this is what men crave most of all.

Having a mission matters more to men than money does. The five decades after the Second World War were an economic golden age. By the 2000s, real incomes were ~4 times higher than they were in the 1950s. But depression increased ten-fold. It is now the biggest cause of disability, and suicide is the top killer of young men.

It’s sometimes said we live in a post-marriage world, but there’s no record of any society without marriage. A post-marriage world would be one not fit for people to live in. Without marriage, the family goes wrong. And when the family goes wrong, eventually everything does.

Family first

As Aristotle famously said, the family comes before the city both in nature and time. The family, in other words, is the first society, and families unite to form tribes, villages, cities and nations. Civil society thus depends on the family.

The rights of the family, then, are not derived from the State. Nor does the State have the right to control family life — a totalitarian fantasy from Plato’s Republic onwards. The state can make it a crime for parents to fail to educate their children, and it can even require a certain minimum level of proficiency in secular subjects, but it cannot dictate how the children will be educated. The reason is simple. The State did not birth the children. The parents did. And the parents have not only the right but the duty to educate the children — physically, intellectually and spiritually.

This, ultimately, is the purpose of marriage: in a word, patriarchy.

Unlike the other animals, man doesn’t just reproduce. He procreates. Marriage is on a far higher level than the coupling of the irrational animals. When Adam calls Eve ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,’ he means that a man must regard his wife as identified with himself.

Hence when the Pharisees argued that Moses had permitted divorce, Christ declared that this was merely a dispensation from the law because of the bad dispositions of men: “From the beginning it was not so." (Matt 19:8) And then He abolished the dispensation and raised marriage to the level of a Sacrament.

Patriarchy isn’t tyranny

The man and woman give themselves to each other permanently, for the sake of children, life-long companionship, and mutual edification in religious and spiritual duties. That is the mission, and it’s the only one that unlocks a man’s masculinity fully because the essence of manhood is the potential for fatherhood.

As in any society, the members of the family have duties to one another. They have to work together for their temporal and spiritual welfare, showing love, tenderness and devotion. The parents have a duty to provide the children with food, clothing and shelter but also training in Christian virtue by both word and example, as well help in preparing for their adult lives. And the children owe their parents obedience, respect, gratitude and love.

In all this, the Holy Family is the model. A husband and father should behave like Joseph; a wife and mother, like Mary; children, like Christ. When a family follows God’s laws, it flourishes. So great is the joy produced that Christ chose to remain at home for the first 30 years of His earthly life.

The father is the head of the family, but he rules by love, not tyranny. And although his wife is subject to him, she’s his companion, not his slave. Their older children, too, although subject to both their parents, can share in their authority over their younger siblings.

Authority is always exercised in a spirit of Christian prudence, charity and patience. The husband will decide where the family live, supervise finances and ensure discipline, but ultimately the husband and wife together make the home. Many of the details of domestic life will therefore be decided between them together.

The fundamental principles of patriarchy, however, will inform every family. The wife will obey her husband willingly and readily in all things that don’t conflict with the law of God. If she doesn’t, she will undermine all authority in the family, including her own. By obeying her husband, she will also teach her children to obey their father. Loving him makes obeying him easy, and because he treats her lovingly, not harshly, loving him is easy.

The father is the foundation

The more the family conforms to the will of God, the more God blesses the whole family. And the foundation of the family is ultimately the father’s fervour in the fulfilment of his religious duties. If he’s not at peace with God, he won’t be at peace with himself, his wife or his children. Selfishness, in a thousand different forms, will reign instead.

Am I attending Mass and the frequently receiving the Sacraments? Am I making adequate provisions for religious reading and family prayers in the home? Am I leading by example in training my wife and children in unselfishness? Am I being selfish in my personal habits, interests and preferences? On these sorts of questions a husband’s success depends.

He fails by hindering his wife and children in the fulfilment of their religious duties. He fails by being physically violent towards them or by being bad tempered or abusive. He fails, too, by being miserly, making insufficient provision for the material needs of wife and children. And he also fails by being wasteful with money, not providing for his children’s future as well as their present.

There are also questions a wife must ask herself. Am I disobeying my husband’s reasonable requests? Am I provoking him to anger by my words or actions? Am I neglecting the home by leaving it untidy or dirty? Am I preparing meals carelessly? Am I neglecting the religious instruction of my children? Am I encouraging them to disrespect their father?

The husband and wife have to work together for the benefit of each other and their children. God did not make the sexes to compete with each other. He made them to complete each other. Mutual love and mutual self-sacrifice are therefore the keys to a happy home.

This doesn’t mean mutual submission. Harmony consists in hierarchy. And in a harmonious home, the woman is most fully feminine — truest to her own nature — when she flourishes in her always-unfolding fascination and delight in the nourishing and upbringing of her children. The man, too, is most fully masculine when presiding over this, protecting and providing not only physically but emotionally and spiritually.

That’s the real work of procreation, and it’s why patriarchy is the purpose of marriage.

Making saints

The children do not see their parents as "the man and woman who come for the week-ends," as Bertrand Russell described the secular family. Nor is marriage seen as some kind of “excuse” for indulging in sex as something sinful in itself. Instead, marriage is a high vocation that allows a man and his wife to co-operate with God in creation by providing children for Christ to sanctify.

Duty and service to God thus come above everything else. The husband’s love for his wife, hers for him and theirs for their children must all blend with Christ’s love for them all. The family will then be a light in the darkness of the world and stay focused on the main purpose of marriage: making saints.

Marriage isn’t mainly about the companionship, affection or consolation the spouses provide each other. All those things are real and good, obviously, but the ultimate point of them all is to bond the spouses together for life for the sake of procreation and the stability of the family.

That’s why, in May 1944, when leading Protestants tried to justify laxity in marriage relationships, Pope Pius XII solemnly condemned the teaching of those who "deny the primary end of marriage to be the generation and education of children or teach that the secondary ends of marriage are not essentially subordinate to the primary end, but are equally principal and independent.”

Your kids aren’t a distraction from your marriage. They’re the main point of it. This doesn’t mean your kids are more important than your wife. Of course they’re not. You’re not married to your kids. But procreation is still the most important purpose of your marriage. God gave Adam a helpmate of a different sex from him so that they would "increase and multiply, and fill the earth." Genesis 1:28.

As St. Augustine said, if Adam had needed help with anything else except procreation, another man would have been more help.

When procreation isn’t central to marriage, sex is robbed of its dignity and becomes a mere plaything. Thus after the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930, at which contraception was allowed, an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. T. H. Whitton, wrote: "So the defense of Christian morals is left to Rome, and the Anglican Communion, and all of us within it, stand disgraced before the world.”

Large families will naturally follow when contraception isn’t used. Before contraception, the average was seven children. And this brings all sorts of ordinary discomforts and requires self sacrifice. But for that very reason it’s conducive to the spiritual growth of the family. An extra sibling is better for a child than an expensive education or an extra holiday is.

And if a couple truly believes that divorce is never permissible, they will think carefully before marrying and also face the inevitable challenge and conflicts that arise with greater fortitude. When Cortez landed on the shores of America, he burnt the boats — no going back. Without the option of divorce, many marriage problems are solved that otherwise would have been deemed impossible.

Time to build

The Roman Empire, Cardinal Manning observed in his Sermons on ecclesiastical subjects, ‘fell not more by the external violence which came upon it from without than from the internal corruption, intellectual and moral, which ate away its vitality within, and turned it from end to end into a heap of intellectual and moral ruin.’ 

The family was the centre of this internal corruption:

‘The state of personal and domestic morals presents a picture of incredible and unimaginable horrors under the roof of every family. And if such was the private life of men, if such was the state of their homes, what was the state of the Commonwealth of the empire at large, in its public morality?’

When the family goes wrong, nothing goes right. That’s why the attack on the West outlined by Wilhelm Reich in his book The Sexual Revolution (1934) outlines exactly this process: weaken the family, especially the authority of fathers.

But Cardinal Manning stresses that Christianity overcame this: ‘The Christian society of the world came as the purifier and the corrective of the evils of personal and domestic immorality; and purifying the personal and domestic morality, it purified the public morality and public life of nations.’

To purify the nation, we must purify the family because the family is the foundation: ‘As Christianity spread from household to household, each family became germs and patterns of Christian society.’

Men do hard things. We don’t bitch. We build. And marriage, the family and patriarchy is our greatest opportunity to do that.