I decided to marry my fiancé the first time I spoke to him
on the phone, about a month before we met in person. This call came after an
exchange on—yes—Twitter led to a week of frenzied letter-writing, during which
time we exchanged some twenty thousand words. As I paced around Princeton’s
campus variously discoursing and giggling with this near-stranger in Madison,
Wisconsin, I said: “You know, it’s probably a good thing we don’t live any
closer—if we did, I think we’d meet up and get married tomorrow.” He concurred.
That was last year, in
April. We met in person in May, and a week later, he sat on the back porch of
my childhood home and asked my father for his blessing. My family was
understandably shocked. They raised many questions and objections, all of which
were fair, earnest, and compassionate. “You barely know each other!” (We knew
all the important things, I said, and had faith in the rest.) “Are you
pregnant?” (I was not.) “Well even if you aren’t, everyone will think that you
are!” (They can do the math later on to satisfy their salacious curiosity.)
“What is the rush? Why do you have to get married right now? Why not wait to
make sure?”
While our situation was
perhaps atypical, all couples considering matrimony, which is to say, all
Catholic couples, must negotiate this framework of dating, engagement, and
marriage. These decisions are in a sense personal—solely between man, woman,
and God—but marriage also represents a union between pre-existing families and the
foundation for a new one, and therefore affects more than two people. Moreover,
because the family exists in relation to other families and to the state as
well as the Church, the decision to marry is at once individual and collective,
private and public. It is therefore jointly governed by personal conscience,
religious teaching, and broader social norms. However, it now seems to me that
Catholic doctrine and contemporary social custom offer different and
increasingly incompatible approaches to these decisions, and that competing
pressures are placed on young people by the Church and the people in the pews.
What, indeed, was the rush? Why did we have to get married so fast? Why
not wait a while? It was not that we took the
commitment lightly. But we felt that we would be no more prepared to offer our
vows to one another if we dated for a more conventional year or two than we
were at that very moment. We were as certain as one can ever be about such
things, though I believe we cannot truly “make sure” that we are marrying the
right person any more than we can “make sure” that God is real. The beauty of
both relationships is that our participation and sacrifice are sourced from our
faith, not our certainty.
After much reflection and
discussion (and some crying and arguing), the answer, nearly tautological in
its simplicity, emerged: we wanted to get married because we wanted to be
married. We wanted to live life as a married couple, to be joined as one flesh.
More than “wanted,” I think. We met with a priest and dear family friend who
helped us articulate this: “If it is God’s will that you be married”—we both
nodded vigorously—“then there is only one thing to do: let God’s will be done.”
I wept with joy.
Marriage is one thing;
weddings, another. Noah moved out of his Madison apartment in early June, and
when we stopped at my parents’ house on our drive to New Jersey, I proposed an
August wedding. This would allow time for preparations, I reasoned, and give
our many out-of-town guests at least some notice. Enter social custom: it
became clear almost immediately that this would not be feasible. Every
imaginable church and reception venue was booked for months and months, dresses
could not be ordered and tailored in time, people’s summer calendars were
already filled to the brim.
Perhaps with greater
ingenuity we could have overcome these challenges, but there remained one
insurmountable obstacle: so little about our meeting and engagement had been
conventional that adding the additional burden of a hastily thrown-together
wedding would have posed a legitimate difficulty for my family, especially my
parents. I wanted them to feel happy and proud welcoming their friends and my
other relations to the wedding of their daughter, not anxious or troubled by
the raised eyebrows and exchanged whispers that would inevitably have
accompanied this plan. Moreover, while Noah and I had come to know each other
very well through hours and hours of searching conversation and through scores
of letters, the same was not true of my family. He and I had experienced
something transformative, and we struggled to telegraph our faith in one
another, and in the call we had heard, to those around us.
Instead we moved in
together. We had to—it no longer made sense to either of us to conceive of our
lives separately. Sharing a home before marriage, while not expressly forbidden
by the Church, is not exactly encouraged, either, on the view that it
dramatically increases the likelihood of premarital sex. We found ourselves
caught between these conflicting traditions, both often upheld simultaneously
by Catholics: we were doctrinally and socially obligated to abstain from
various forms of intimacy until we were married, but we could not get married too
quickly, as it would seem scandalous, improper, and rash.
I should add that
understandable questions about propriety are hardly the only factor
contributing to ever longer engagements: expanding wedding planning checklists,
balloon arches, s’mores buffet, drone video coverage, and, of course, money. (A
recent study found that the cost for a comparable wedding has increased nearly
four hundred percent since 1974, adjusted for inflation.) Meanwhile, longer
engagements mean that vendors and venues are booked further in advance. All of
these things prolong the period between the establishment of a couple’s
intention and freedom to marry and the sacrament of matrimony.
During the last two years,
many couples found themselves forced to shorten their lists of invitations, to
host simpler outdoor receptions in public parks when their venues canceled. In
the course of this, they discovered that it was marriage that mattered, not the
party. As I write this, wedding magazines are touting the “micro wedding” as
the latest trend. Trends come and go, but I wish that shortened engagements and
less formal weddings would become normal for couples who are ready to become
husband and wife.
One reasonable response to
all of this is that we are called to follow God’s commandments regardless of
whether doing so is difficult or not. In fact, sometimes the difficulty is the
point. “It was too hard” is not an acceptable excuse for failing to live in the
way God asks us to do, and there is no defense for privileging one’s social reputation
over the health of one’s soul. But shouldn’t we try to make it at least
slightly easier to model both piety and propriety by observing different
customs? I am not advocating for the construction of drive-through
chapels—marriage is joyous but very serious business, and requires
contemplation and spiritual preparation—but a respectable wedding should not
require more than a year of planning: not for social, financial, or logistical
reasons.
In his Confession, Leo Tolstoy observed that when “religious doctrine is
professed in some other realm, at a distance from life and independent of it,”
faith will decline. If Catholics wish to encourage young people to live in line
with the Church’s teachings, it seems to me that some of our current social
practices around weddings must change. And unlike many aspects of Catholic
life, this change must be bottom-up. The hierarchy cannot directly alter how we
apply the precepts of our religion to our social lives. While social customs
restrict the choices of individuals, it is these such choices in the aggregate
that create and ultimately revise the customs themselves.
We’ll be married in June.
Meredith
McDonough is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton.