Because the following article is a critique of biblical views of marriage, much of the language is within a husband/wife binary. This should not be taken as support for the view that marriage can only be between one man and one woman. The Center for Inquiry fully supports marriage equality and inclusivity.—Editors

One of the unsung heroes of the twentieth century, who paved the way for marriage being considered a form of intimate friendship, was a Progressive California judge named Ben B. Lindsey. In 1927, he coauthored a book titled Companionate Marriage,1 in which he laid out arguments that for most people today seem yawningly reasonable yet in those days raised more than eyebrows. He proposed that young men and women ought to be able to engage in a trial marriage for a year to see if they were truly compatible. During this probationary love test, couples were encouraged to use birth control to prevent pregnancy and parenthood before their marital bond was viable. Once the year was up, if the couple had wind in their sails and believed they were well-matched, they could convert their provisional marriage into a more permanent arrangement. If, on the other hand, they believed they were ill-suited to be together, they could fast-track a divorce and go their separate ways.

The good Judge Lindsey would wholeheartedly agree with the nugget attributed to his clever contemporary Mark Twain: “Love heightens all the senses except the common.” He accepted the notion that the forces bringing lovers together can be very different from what keeps them together. The motivation to be together during the romantic phase of a relationship goes without saying: wanting to bask in the erotic excitement and mutual adoration lovers offer each other. Getting lost in each other’s eyes, the giddy laughter, the enchanting smiles, the engrossing conversations, the electrifying sensuality—all fueling a dream-like state of lovers feeling that they were made for each other, a perfect fit. The romantic intensity is destined to wear off, even though lovers in love are convinced it will be everlasting. They are blind to the buzz-kill axioms served up by philosophers on matters relating to how the intensity of romantic love fades over time: “First there is the thrill, then there is the coping”2 and “Love is skill rather than enthusiasm.”3

For the fortunate, if the initial romance is to blossom into a deeper, more settled form of lasting intimate companionship, then the high-octane motivation to be together must involve some commitment to stay together based on the couple’s realistic view of who each of them is as a person and how lovingly they are capable of treating each other. Although he did not use the term explicitly, Lindsey was a forerunner of the belief that healthy marriages were best established based on personal commitment.4 This term, put forth by veteran sociologist Michael Johnson, is at the heart of what makes companionate marriages/partnerships—and ultimately, as we shall see, flourishing love rooted in secular love ethics—survive and thrive. The partners’ attraction to each other and the quality-of-life benefits of the relationship—when mutually kept up—sustain a personal commitment to stay together. Couples who are personally committed to treasure the emotional bond they have and stay involved largely exist because they want to.

On the other hand, the moral commitment to a marriage is rooted in the notion that spouses stay together out of a sense of duty rather than desire. Romance may make courting partners desire to be together, but once marriage occurs, spouses have a moral obligation to remain together, typically based on the conjugal vows they declared in the eyes of God and religious authorities. They commit to their marriage vows and marriage as a divinely inspired covenant, distinct from a commitment to make each other happy. The popular Christian evangelical writer Gary Thomas captures this idea when he poses the question: “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?”5

Holiness is about sticking with a marriage contract no matter what—“in sickness and in health, until death do us part”—whether or not you desire to make your spouse feel loved or whether he or she desires to make you feel loved in return. This is reflected in the slogan “I walked up the aisle and said ‘I do,’ and I’ve been doing it ever since.” This can have absurd ramifications. A client recently disclosed that although he hadn’t spoken to his wife in three years—her alcoholism and infidelity had led to their undoing—he was not pursuing a divorce, because “after all, a marriage vow is a marriage vow.” It’s no less absurd if:

Your spouse is committed to you, but you don’t know if he or she actually likes you and enjoys spending time together.
The ideal of marriage as a “sacred union” or “holy covenant” has become more important than the direct experience of how spouses treat one another.
Promising to love someone forever assumes love is within our conscious control and a marital commitment made at one point in time is sufficient to override all that life throws at spouses as time passes.

Holiness is also about sacrifice. In the Christian tradition, Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice, giving his life for the sins of the world. In this spirit, a holy marriage is one where both spouses strive to sacrifice their own self-interest, placing the happiness of the other before their own, or preferring to suffer rather than let a spouse suffer. To achieve a good marriage, Thomas exhorts his flock: “You must crucify your selfishness.”6 Selfless giving or acting kind, generous, appreciative, patient, or forgiving without any need for it to be reciprocated—agape love—is the divine barometer for married couples to follow. If spouses return the favor and act kind, generous, appreciative, patient, or forgiving, that’s a secondary benefit. The primary benefit is meeting your Christian duty and bolstering your chances of being rewarded with eternal life after death.

Agape love is naively blind to matters of fairness in intimate relationships. Humans are earthly creatures who want their intimate relationships to be fair and equitable. They know in their heart of hearts that the love they give is always influenced by the love they receive. If there’s overall balance in giving and getting based on mutual love and respect across the things that matter to them—sex, overt displays of affection and appreciation, support with housework, income generation, childrearing, being paid attention to, planning and going on vacations—the relationship pleasingly chugs along. A husband who tries to be intentional in supporting his wife in the ways he knows register for her—being on time picking up the kids from school; noticing without being told the milk carton is empty and swinging by the store on the way home from work to have milk on hand the next morning for breakfast; really paying attention while she talks; offering a foot massage after a busy day—may not expect consideration in return but has learned it just happens on its own accord in a flourishing relationship where mutual love and respect are givens. It’s likely he’s treating her lovingly not just because he loves her—gifting her his love—but, consciously or not, because she deserves it; because she spontaneously came up behind him and kissed him affectionately on the back of the neck that morning; paid the mortgage on time; folded his laundry without fanfare; took extra time reading bedtime stories to their son even though she was exhausted; and agreed to stay up late to watch a movie he liked more than she did.

One of the key problems with a moral-religious marital commitment is that spouses are motivated to make themselves lovable in the eyes of God more than in the eyes of their beloved. That often means adhering to a moral code that can interfere with the flourishing of intimate relationships—no sex before marriage, sex mainly or only for procreation, sacrificing one’s personal preferences, expectations of benevolence and forgiveness under threat of divine punishment, and wifely subservience. Couples are derailed from listening to any innate human voices in their heads telling them to be fair, appreciative, reasonable, kind, affectionate, and sexually responsive strictly for their own well-being, that of their beloved, and the flourishing of their relationship.

Almost a century ago, Lindsey was cognizant of how a religious moral code can gum up the works as far as humans treating each other well simply for the sake of wanting to treat each other well. He pulled no punches:

When people begin to take the responsibility for their own moral decisions on their own shoulders they will begin to be moral. Theology, masquerading as divinely revealed religion, has forbidden them that right long enough; and it has thereby produced, quite without anybody intending it, a monstrous amount of ethical impotence, stupid conduct, cruelty, fear, and asinine blundering on the part of human beings who would have done well enough if they had been taught to follow that inner craving for what is just, right, and beautiful which is the common heritage of all of us.7

Lindsey hinted at the need for a secular approach to love that keeps spouses answerable to each other for the quality of their relationship, drawing upon their innate potential to behave compassionately. God may work in mysterious ways. In matters of human love, there’s hardly any mystery. As I embark on outlining the contours of contemporary secular ethics of love—viewing a partnership as a sort of mutual happiness project—you may be struck by the ordinariness of what I am proposing: the lack of mystery and the human virtues baked into small everyday gestures that spur intimate partners to be the best versions of themselves with each other.

Secular Love Ethics

A key tenet of secular love ethics is a fairness habit of mind. We don’t need to match each other’s considerate gestures—I took out the trash this week, so it’s on you to do it next week; I coached our daughter’s soccer team last season, so you need to volunteer to referee this season; I initiated sex the past few times, so I’m holding off until you show me you want to get under the covers with me. Nonetheless, in the grand scheme of things, there is a felt sense of respectful reciprocity. An abiding sentiment of overall balance of benefits and burdens across what each partner feels is essential. A willingness and intentional attitude in regard to making the mutual adjustments are necessary to benefit each other’s quality of life—because there is mutual care for each other’s comfort and satisfaction. When there’s fluency in this arrangement, there is no deliberate scorekeeping. It is simply a well-practiced, embodied way of being—mutually and often silently delivered up: tiptoeing to the bathroom during the night so as not to awaken a partner or refraining from emptying the dishwasher too early in the morning before they are fully awake; showing up to carry groceries from the car, unasked; and so forth. Considerate gestures beget considerate gestures. British philosopher Mike Martin sums up this mutually caring disposition: “Marriage involves the coordinated pursuit of the overall happiness of two people who share a life.”8

Notions of the Golden Rule apply: Treat others as you would like them to treat you. This commonsense ethical directive dates back to the time of Confucius, over 2,500 years ago. Although some version of it can be found in all the major world religions, as Harvard University Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein asserts: “Not a single one of these versions of the golden rule requires a God.”9 It relies on normal human empathy, or people’s capacity to vicariously experience the emotional states of others. Emotions are contagious. Other’s feelings resonate with our own, providing us with emotional information on how our actions bring a smile or frown to their faces. Empathy is what alerts us to consider our impact on others. It results in humans caring to care. It’s what makes people ponder whether if they put themselves in the other’s place, then they can see why they felt rejected, why they were frustrated, or why they were overjoyed.

Of course, to put yourself in someone’s place requires some affinity for knowing yourself: what turns you on and off; what the negotiables and nonnegotiables are in terms of how you prefer to live your life. Being self-respecting in this way is foundational for respecting others. The same rules apply to you as they apply to me. If I would like my preferences honored, then I need to find a way to honor yours. Loving application of the Golden Rule involves negotiating the tension between one’s self-interests and self-giving, requiring compromise.

On the other hand, Christian love ethics often privilege self-sacrifice at the cost of mutually respectful compromise between partners’ self-interests. The tenets of agape love are clear: willful suffering of disadvantages and discomforts for the benefit of another without need for reciprocation. As already mentioned, this is accorded divine significance because, as the Bible says, God sent Jesus to die for the sins of humanity, the ultimate sacrifice. In the Christian tradition, couples are encouraged to mirror this sort of unconditional love. It involves acting lovingly even when your spouse is a perennial grouch. Turning the other cheek when slighted instead of just turning on him or her. The problem here is that turning the other cheek excessively makes people cheeky—or resentful. Over-giving and under-benefitting leads any self-respecting person to feeling exploited. Whether consciously or not, resentment is the natural outcome.

There’s a funny line by humorist Greg Eisenberg that attests to this inevitability: “I want to see myself as a loving person, but you get in my way.”10 This is notwithstanding how repeatedly suffering the slights of a perennial grouch without self-advocacy pushback lets that grouch off the hook for being a grouch, enabling the grouch to keep on being a grouch. Religious ethics that underemphasize self-respect and relational accountability are a brittle foundation on which to build a close-knit intimate bond.

While, an agape mindset renders a person moral in the supernatural sense—winning God’s favor and maximizing one’s chances of eternal life in Heaven after death—it oddly can position people to behave unethically, in the secular sense, and cause emotional suffering in the lives of real flesh-and-blood people. All too often an agape mindset pivots women into over-giving, believing that to give is to give in, and giving in leads to so much surrender of self and interpersonal power that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness arise. Indeed, agape love often fits hand-in-glove with patriarchy and gender traditionalism, locking women into a homemaker role and a subservient relationship with their husbands as a self-sacrificing expectation. The blog Biblical Gender Roles boils this point down: “In Christian marriage the man conforms his will to God’s will and the wife conforms her will to her husband’s will.”11 From a secular perspective, this is unethical because it is an unequal arrangement that limits women’s voices and choices. And, as I will argue below, it sidelines women from access to an egalitarian marital arrangement as a precondition for a vital, lasting marriage.

All said, it’s still good to have a dollop of agape love in your relationship toolkit—not to establish yourself as righteous in the eyes of God but simply to better suffer the insufferable habits of an endearing significant other. Heather Havrilesky, the connoisseur of marital tedium, writes very transparently about the blessings and the curses of conjugal life: “Marriage requires amnesia, a mute button, a filter on the lens, a damper, some blinders, some bumpers, some ear plugs, a nap. You need to erase these stories, misplace this tape, zoom out, slowly dissolve to black.” Nonetheless, self-regard can never be denied: “Surviving a marriage requires self-care, time alone, meditation, escape, selfishness.”12

The Importance of Listening

Something as elemental as taking seriously the human responsibility to truly pay attention during conversations also holds stature for any secular love ethics. What seems straightforward at first glance, though extraordinarily difficult to mutually enact in any sustained fashion, is showing genuine curiosity about what speakers have to say. This is reflected in the quote by French political activist and mystic Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”13 Overcoming our own susceptibility to be self-absorbed, opinionated, oblivious, or just plain preoccupied or distractible is a prerequisite for true listening. It’s befuddling to me that conversational ethics is not a scholarly topic for educators to pursue or required to be taught in educational institutions. What can be more important for society than to impart in future love partners—who might also model it for the children they raise—the know-how of good conversation; the right to complete a sentence or an unfinished thought; obtaining eye contact while speaking; courteous turn-taking; anticipating a reasonable amount of curiosity; not “talk at” but “talk with”; relying upon listeners to not appear indifferent to what we have to say or, in this day and age, to be unglued to their smartphones? In his wonderful book The Pursuit of Attention, American sociologist Charles Derber hints at conversational ethics when he refers to “attention-getting and attention-giving initiatives,”14 but his ideas didn’t really take off among university scholars.

The words used when leaning in with genuine curiosity while dialoguing are easily recognizable: “Are you saying…?”; “What did you mean by that?”; “That’s interesting”; “No kidding, how did that go?”

Affirmative responses show we both care to listen and listen to care: “That’s sad”; “I’m glad you had a good time”; “You were so right on”; “I’m happy that worked out in your favor.” These can take the form of positive reframing of an issue even if it’s a bit over-enhanced. Husband: “I can always tell I’ve put on a few pounds when my wedding ring doesn’t fit well on my finger.” Wife: “Maybe it’s just your blood circulation being out of whack from sitting all day.”

Sometimes, even in the best of circumstances, affirmative responses in the context of disputed points of view get coughed up rather than wholeheartedly emitted: “I hear you”; “I get what you’re saying”; “I understand.” What results in people acting retentive in responding with such run-of-the-mill statements is their insufficient grasp of the difference between acknowledging and agreeing. They assume that acknowledging is agreeing when they may disagree. They underappreciate that respect shown by uttering phrases such as “I hear you”; “I get what you are saying”; “I understand” can be followed up with responses that reflect self-respect: “But I don’t see it the same way”; “I have a different take on the issue”; “My memory of events is different.” The word respect originates from the Latin respectus, meaning “regard, a looking at.” Mere acknowledgment of what loved ones have to say with affirmative phrases is an act of respect. To omit these from our discourse—leaning out when dialoguing—is always disrespectful in some shape or form. We are not graciously considering what they have to say.

Leaning out in conversations can take various forms. The listener can be soft-edged in their approach, ignoring what is being said, appearing preoccupied, looking away from the speaker, or tinkering on a computer or smartphone. Hard-edged leaning out reactions in discussions are tangential or belligerent in nature. The former encompasses the listener mystifyingly not tracking. Wife: “Wow, after the rains in recent weeks the flowers are really in bloom.” Husband: “Did you remember to make that appointment with the dentist for me? My tooth is really hurting.” The latter are antagonistic. Husband: “I’d really like to buy one of those new electric Ford Mustangs.” Wife: “On your salary that’s a reach.”

Couples who are able to nonverbally lean in well together—sync up behaviorally—are rewarded with strong marriages. Subliminally, when bodies talk and listen to each other in well-coordinated ways—embodied rapport—it can create that all-important sense of “we-ness” in a relationship. Unconscious matching of voice intonation, breathing and speech patterns, facial expressions, and even something as humdrum as the pace at which partners walk, is a bellwether of sorts for determining the strength of their intimate bond. In 2018, a team of Israeli researchers published an article in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at how basic motor synchrony instills feelings of closeness and concluded that having unhappy couples take long walks at the same pace might be a step in the right direction.15

The Importance of Physical Affection

No portrayal of secular love ethics would be complete without a discussion of showing and maintaining love with physical affection—not just sex but spontaneous hugs, kisses, cuddles, and snuggles. The regular sharing of physical affection is often emblematic of the strength of a couple’s intimate bond. In the first study of its kind, polling a representative sample of married Americans across levels of education and income, and ethnicity, ranging from age twenty to ninety-three, of the 46 percent of women and 49 percent of men who reported being “very intensely in love,” displays of physical affection—frequency of sex, hugging, kissing, cuddling, hand-holding—stood out as inextricable from their marital happiness. In the older cohort, frequency of sex dropped off but not spontaneous displays of physical affection.16 So much for what the sweet, all-giving mother in The Simpsons, Marge, says in a rare moment of cynicism: “Passion is for teenagers and foreigners.”17

Sylvia Plath alluringly inscribed in one of her published journals: “Kiss me and you’ll see how important I am.”18 Happy couples show how important they are to each other with kisses. They are joined at the lips. It has been shown that almost 60 percent of people who deem themselves very happily married kiss passionately several times a week.19 A recent research project out of Brigham Young University surveying over 1,600 people who had been in a committed relationship for at least two years concluded: “Kissing frequently could be considered a bell weather [sic] of sorts for determining if the relationship bonding is strong and the sexual quality high.”20 The antidote to a partner who gets on your nerves is to get on his or her nerves—with a kiss. Lips have one of the highest concentrations of sensory neurons compared to any other body region. The brain’s somatosensory cortex instantly processes a host of neural and chemical messages, leaving Chip Walter at Scientific American to conclude: “a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets, and emotions.”21

The Importance of an Existential Distillation of Values in Marital Resilience

Another building block of secular love ethics pertains to how accepting our mortality can create greater urgency and willingness to hone our ability to love. The late British-American intellectual Christopher Hitchens, always irreverent when he inhabited Earth, once remarked: “We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accept the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.”22 Living with fuller awareness of the capriciousness of existence—the randomness of our own death and that of our beloved—sharpens the desire to be more intentional with what we do with our time. Embracing death as inevitable rather than as an abstraction or portal to eternity facilitates zeroing in on the things that matter in life.

Nothing matters more than cultivating the most loving bond possible with our mate. It’s deeply unpleasant to contemplate “death regrets,” such as our beloved dying amid our holding a grudge against them or nursing a petty grievance. But such unpleasant thoughts can help us get ahead of these death regrets and see the tragedy and ridiculousness in holding grudges and nursing petty grievances, spurring us to mend our ways. Yale University scholar Martin Hagglund weighs in here: “The key to breaking habit is to recall that we can lose what we love.”23 Befriending death goads us to love our beloved as if it’s not going to last. It makes us chase the profound consolation associated with knowing when that dreaded but inescapable day arrives we can derive solace from the fact that we strove to love at our best with our beloved dying knowing with confidence that he or she was truly loved.

In mid-life, the shrinking window of earthly time becomes more pronounced. Carlo Strenger, in the Psychology Department at Tel Aviv University, sees this as a pivotal period in which people are driven to re-sort their priorities: “Life needs to be pared down to the essentials.”24 The temptation is to manage the dawning death anxiety with hedonistic pursuits, going for broke amusing ourselves to death with sex, drugs, or fancy material purchases. Prominent American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, would say this life trajectory reflects mid-lifers managing their death anxiety by “tranquilizing themselves with the trivial.”25 Ultimately, a more fulfilling way of dealing with death anxiety is to engage in what he calls “immortality projects”: meaningful pursuits that leave a lasting legacy to the special people in your life and society as a whole. One such legacy is to exit the world leaving loved ones knowing they were loved—not in the abstract but in the down-to-earth ways we treated them day in and day out. This definition of a love life well-lived requires what the Roman Stoics would consider overcoming our insatiability in mid-life, not indulging it. Our greedy needs to have it all somehow must be supplanted by what the contemporary Stoic philosopher William Irvine argues is “creating in ourselves a desire for the things we already have.”26

Yet another virtuous immortality project—a healthy way to manage death anxiety—is to leave a wholesome legacy for loved ones by actively undoing the dysfunctional patterns of caregiving visited upon them in their family of origin. Love them in the ways they were entitled to be loved as children for the mere fact that they were vulnerable beings worthy of a head start in life. Most people emerge out of childhood afflicted with what Thomas Bradley and Benjamin Karney, psychologists at UCLA, call “enduring vulnerabilities.”27 Past fateful experiences of rejection, abandonment, or plain emotional invalidation are prime expectations to be treated similarly in the present by significant others. People so afflicted become sensitized to feeling rejected, abandoned, or disregarded in their everyday interactions with partners. That can have disruptive effects. Another amusing line by humorist Greg Eisenberg pertains: “I fully expected to be disappointed, and you didn’t let me down one bit.”28 Insofar as insight can be gained into these dynamics, a person can avoid falling into the trap of reinjuring his or her partner, even turning the tide and responding favorably.

The Fine Line between Satisfaction and Complacent Mediocrity

It should come as no surprise to the reader when I conclude that a grounding in secular love ethics contributes to lasting flourishing intimate relationships. Science backs that up. Let’s start with the data on couples who adopt a fairness habit of mind with each other. A host of studies reveals that couples—dating, cohabitating, or married—in fair and equitable relationships report high degrees of passionate and companionate love, sexual satisfaction, marital happiness and stability, fewer affairs, and confidence in the durability of their commitment.29 Marriages where gender traditionalism exists and partners slot into hierarchical roles based on self-sacrifice and moral duty don’t fare as well. In the largest and most detailed study available of marital strengths and problems, involving over 50,000 couples, researchers uncovered that the greatest threat to a happy marriage was unequal sharing of power. Eighty-one percent of couples who believed their relationship was egalitarian were happily married, while 82 percent of couples in traditional/hierarchical marriages were unhappily married.30 On a similar note, a research team headed up by Nathan Leonhardt at the University of Toronto, looking at mutual respect and shared power in long-term marriages, concluded: “The ideal relationship seems built upon a feeling of mutual influence, rather than one or the other feeling that someone in the relationship has a higher level of power.”31

This is not to say that marriages where spouses have a shared religious outlook encouraging individual self-sacrifice and a belief in unequal gender roles cannot last—or be satisfying for that matter. We know from the work of Samuel Perry in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma that religiously committed couples tend to stay together and report high levels of relationship satisfaction.32 However, there’s a difference between being in a satisfactory relationship and being in a flourishing one. Being satisfied implies that you’re comfortable with the way things are. You’ve reached an end point or your limit; better to keep the bar where it is, not raise it. It’s a B-relationship. Not a bad grade but not a great grade either. There’s a thin line between being satisfied and being complacent with mediocrity.

Flourishing—a word that has its roots in the ancient Greek Aristotelian term eudaimonia—and complacency aren’t good bedfellows. Flourishing emphasizes the mutual desire to enlarge each other’s well-being in a relationship. It involves not just showing interest in the life pursuits that provide meaning and purpose for a mate but actively supporting them. It’s about couples being authentic with each other, being real, and doing away with pretense. It’s about realizing a relationship’s full potential—not in a manic-like, enough-is-never-enough way and not in a let’s-reach-for-the-stars way, but in a let’s-really-settle-in-together way, digging in and locating the courage to push each other to make a good relationship better. The British philosopher Robert Goodin touches upon what it means to genuinely settle in for couples who fully commit to each other in a we-are-together-until-one-or-both-of-us-hits-the-grave-so-let’s-make-the-best-of-it way: “We do so with the intention and expectation of sticking with it more firmly and sometimes for different reasons than we would if we had chosen it for satisficing-style reasons alone.”33

As already mentioned, abiding by secular love ethics to sustain healthy romantic bonds is neither a mysterious nor otherworldly endeavor, nor is it a divine exercise in mutual self-sacrifice. It entails digging in and taking seriously the joint responsibility for the emotional upkeep involved and keeping the doors of physical intimacy open. Seizing upon the small opportunities to pay attention to each other more intently and be present during affectionate moments adds up over time. The goodwill bank account prospers. A delightful sense that you’re freely giving the love your partner earns and getting the love you deserve kicks in. The wheels of give and get, and get and give, benevolently self-rotate. The negotiables get easier to handle—what color to paint the bathroom, sushi or Indian food when dining out, where to go on vacation, and whether your daughter should do chores to earn her allowance or just receive it. The mental chatter that arises after unpleasant interactions, where you try to persuade yourself that you could have done better with some fantasized other, gradually dies down over time. The low-grade ambivalence fades. There’s a steady dismantling of the unhelpful ideal that has long since set up residence in your head making you hold out for something else, something different, something better. Stephen Levine, in his concise book Demystifying Love, mentions this secretive resistance to truly committing to and settling into the preciousness of our loved one and the bond we have created together: “Much of adult life is spent with the awareness of the gap between our private sense of ideal love and our actual experience of ourself and our partner in a relationship.”34 The person you believed had the potential to be irreplaceable when you declared your marriage vows or professed a long-term commitment to has become irreplaceable in actuality. More awe-inspiring is the palpable sense that the intimate relationship you’ve jointly molded over the years—your mutual happiness project—has become irreplaceable.

Notes

1. Judge Ben B. Lindsey and Wainright Evans, Companionate Marriage. New York, NY: Boni & Liveright, 1927.

2. Robert Solomon, About Love. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006, p. 101.

3. Alain De Botton, The Course of Love. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2016, p. 7.

4. Michael P. Johnson, “The Tripartite Nature of Married Commitment: Personal, Moral, and Structural Reasons to Stay Married.” Journal of Marriage and Family vol. 61, no. 1 (1999), pp. 160–177.

5. Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015.

6. Ibid., p. 128.

7. Judge Ben B. Lindsey and Wainright Evans, Companionate Marriage, p. 346.

8. Mike W. Martin, Happiness and the Good Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 120.

9. Greg M. Epstein, Good without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010, p. 115.

10. Greg Eisenberg, Letting Go Is All We Have to Hold Onto. Louisville, CO: Curved-Space Comedy, 2018, p. 146.

11. Biblical Gender Roles, “The 12 Required Attributes of Marital Love.” Biblical Gender Roles, June 20, 2014. Available online at https://biblicalgenderroles.com/2014/06/20/the-12-required-attributes-of-marital-love/.

12. Heather Havrilesky, “A Spouse is a Blessing and a Curse,” The New York Times, December 26, 2021, p. 4.

13. Maria Popova, “Simone Weil on Attention and Grace,” The Marginalian, August 19, 2015. Available online at https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/19/simone-weil-attention-gravity-and-grace/.

14. Charles Derber, The Pursuit of Attention. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000.

15. David Hilla Sharon, et al., “Being on the Same Wavelength: Behavioral Synchrony between Partners and Its Influence on the Experience of Intimacy.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 55, no. 10 (2019), pp. 2983–3008.

16. K. Daniel O’ Leary, et al., “Is Long-Term Love More Than a Rare Phenomenon? If So, What Are Its Correlates?” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 3, no. 2 (2012), pp. 241–249.

17. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity. New York, NY: Harper, 2007, p. 3.

18. Karen V. Kukil, ed., The Unabridged Journal of Sylvia Plath. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2000.

19. Chrisanna Northrup, Pepper Schwartz, and James Witte, The Normal Bar. New York, NY: Harmony Books, 2013, p. 61.

20. Dean M. Busby, Veronica Hanna-Walker, and Chelmon E. Leavitt, “A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss: Kissing Frequency, Sexual Quality, Attachment, and Sexual and Relationship Satisfaction.” Sexual and Relationship Therapy, January 10, 2020. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14681994.2020.1717460.

21. Chip Walter, “Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss.” Scientific American, January 31, 2008. Available online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/affairs-of-the-lips-why-we-kiss/.

22. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great. New York, NY: Twelve Books, 2009, p. 6.

23. Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2019, p. 107.

24. Carlo Strenger, “Paring Down Life to the Essentials: An Epicurean Psychodynamics of Midlife Change.” Psychoanalytic Psychology, vol. 26, no. 3 (2009), pp. 246–258.

25. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. New York, NY: Free Press, 1997, p. 80.

26. William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 67.

27. John Gottman and Nan Silver, What Makes Love Last. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012, p. 116.

28. Greg Eisenberg, Letting Go Is All We Have to Hold Onto, p. 176.

29. Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson, “Equity Theory in Close Relationships” in Paul A. M. Van Lange, Arie W. Kruglanski, and E. Tory Higgins, eds., Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology. London, UK: Glyph International, 2011, 200–217.

30. Dennis J. Preato, “Egalitarian Marriages Prove Happier Than Hierarchical Marriages,” 2004. Available online at http://empowerinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/Egalitarian-Marriages-Prove-Happier-than-Hierarchical-Marriages.pdf.

31. Nathan D. Leonhardt, et al., “Longitudinal Influence of Shared Marital Power on Marital Quality and Attachment Security.” Journal of Family Psychology, vol. 34, no. 1 (2019), p. 9.

32. Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, “For Better or for Worse? Gender Ideology, Religious Commitment, and Relationship Quality,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 55, no. 4 (2016), pp. 737–755.

33. Robert E. Goodin, On Settling. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 40.

34. Stephen B. Levine, Demystifying Love. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007, p. 8.

Sidebar

Speaker Mike Johnson’s Mistaken Christian Marriage Values

In late October 2023, Mike Johnson was catapulted out of relative obscurity when he was elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Adding to the details to be explored about his background was the revelation that he had entered into a covenant marriage with his wife in 1999. Journalists scurried to learn about this rare nuptial arrangement. They discovered it was a counterpoint to the no-fault divorce laws of the 1970s, which allowed “irreconcilable differences” as grounds to dissolve a marriage rather than proof of wrongdoing by a spouse. Basically, those championing covenant marriage seek to turn back the clock and legally enshrine an altar-to-grave approach to marriage, limiting the grounds for divorce to extreme situations such as adultery, physical or sexual abuse, or imprisonment.

More to the heart of the matter, the blueprint for covenant marriage relies heavily on traditional Christian marriage values—that is, as they pertain to heterosexual couples. Johnson has espoused views in the past that cast him as vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage, referring to it in a 2004 editorial as “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”1 The model is that opposite-sex spouses possess a sacred duty to abide by a ‘til-death-do-we-part nuptial vow. Joint self-sacrifice and wifely submission loom large, as Jason Soroski expresses in the Christian blog Crosswalk: “This is a picture of two people in mutual submission to Christ, and a wife submitting to a godly man who leads the home spiritually and who loves his wife more than he loves himself.”2 Sexual purity before marriage and fidelity afterward—inclusive of both erotic actions and fantasies—are held sacrosanct. Along these lines, in the same 2004 editorial, Johnson declared, “Simply put, sex of any kind outside of the marriage of one man and woman is ultimately destructive. Social science is now confirming what the Bible has always said.” In a recently recirculated 2022 interview, Johnson publicly acknowledged that he and his son use “accountability software” called CovenantEyes to monitor each other’s online search habits to ensure abstinence from pornography. It would not be outside the pale to assume that Johnson collapses the distinction between looking and acting, considering pornography a violation of spouses’ moral duty to remain sexually faithful to one another.

All this begs the question: Do traditional Christian values, when adopted, actually improve people’s chances of staying sexually/romantically faithful, lower divorce rates, and produce vital marriages?

Let’s start with the data on sexual fidelity and divorce. About a decade ago, Ashley Madison—a website catering to romantically restless married and partnered people whose motto is “Life is Short. Have an Affair”—conducted a survey of its members that yielded some eye-popping findings.3 About 25 percent of respondents self-identified as “born again” evangelical Christians, compared with 1.4 percent describing themselves as “atheist” and 2 percent as “agnostic.” Apparently, adhering to a strict biblical moral code fails to offer a substantial number of religiously minded married folks immunity against breaking their sacred nuptial promise and jumping online to look for fresh romance.

Nor does being of strong Christian faith offer any blanket guarantee against checking out pornography. In a 2015 journal piece, aptly titled “Do American States with More Religious or Conservative Populations Search for More Sexual Content on Google?,” a duo of Canadian psychologists answered in the affirmative. Their findings indicate that interest in pornography tends to be greater in regions of America where inhabitants are more religiously and politically conservative.4 In good Freudian fashion, conservative Christianity may rev up restless sexual desires and render pornography usage more attractive to many vulnerable believers by admonishing it so strongly—a classic case of the lure of the forbidden—with unhappy consequences.

We know from the work of Samuel Perry at the University of Oklahoma that evangelical Christians are disproportionately more likely to pursue divorce because of a spouse’s pornography viewing or sexual/romantic infidelity.5 Having a private erotic fantasy life and sexually straying are not treated as examples of normal human proclivities to be struggled with and possibly forgiven when harm is caused but as evidence of moral failures and injuries that are harder to forgive and heal from.

Indeed, based on the research of Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa, we know that there is a strong correlation between living in a community with large concentrations of religiously conservative people and a higher risk for divorce.6 They make the argument that, by overzealously trying to regulate sexuality, faith communities and leaders contribute to legions of followers prematurely launching marriages (getting married to legitimize a sex life or because of an accidental pregnancy) that become fragile due to earlier birth rates of children, women exiting higher education and the labor force to raise children in accordance with patriarchal notions of a woman’s domestic role, and the economic and relationship stagnation this can result in.

Biblically inspired messaging around wives deferring to their husbands, mixed with touting sex for procreation and denouncing sex for pleasure and bonding, can shortchange women in the bedroom. This is borne out in The Great Sex Rescue study,7 in which it was discovered that only 48 percent of the 20,000 Christian married women surveyed usually or always orgasmed during sex, compared to 65 percent of women in the general population—a figure arrived at by a trusted study headed up by David Frederick at Chapman University.8 A plausible takeaway here would be that many Christian men do not practice what is preached in terms of giving selflessly to their wives, at least in matters of sexual gratification. Patriarchal thinking surrounding the sexual entitlement of husbands may be more of a drag on marriages than evangelicals are aware. That happens to be the conclusion of the authors of The Great Sex Rescue survey, who use their findings to redefine godly sex as inclusive of female sexual pleasure: “We’d like to offer a new expectation: no man should be satisfied unless his wife is also satisfied.”

Much ink has been spilled in Christian circles teasing apart how spouses should interpret the well-known scripture “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them” (Colossians 3:18–19). Nowadays, most church leaders bend over backward to reassure their flock that the Bible does not consign wives to be inferior and voiceless. That said, long-established notions of male privilege and unequal power sharing linger on. Statements put out by the fundamentalist Protestant organization, Focus on the Family, testify to that “families need leaders. The buck has to stop somewhere if the household is to function smoothly and efficiently … in the final analysis, the husband carries the greater responsibility for leadership.”9

Thought leaders on the religious Right, such as Speaker Mike Johnson, often double down on traditional values as the supposed solution to the fragility of marriage as an institution, when, in fact, such values place an undue burden on it and actually contribute to its fragility. As we have seen, the religious culture of Christian conservatives often compels couples to marry younger to legitimize a sex life, undergo economic disadvantage from women leaving the workforce at younger ages to bear children, construct marriages with unequal power and pleasure sharing, and view pornography use and infidelity as unforgivable moral failures worthy of divorce—repressions which make marriage preservation more challenging. A 2019 Pew Research study found that fewer than 20 percent of American adults view being married as essential to living a fulfilling life. People seem pessimistic about what marriage can offer in the way of life happiness. Now more than ever, we need to scrutinize how traditional values leave people disenchanted, not enchanted, by the prospect of marriage.

Notes

1. Mike Johnson, “Must Be Opposed.” The Times of Shreveport, February 22, 2004. Available online at https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-times-kfile/134049583/.

2. Jason Soroski, “What Is the Purpose of Covenant Marriage in the Bible?” Crosswalk, February 5, 2021. Available online at https://www.crosswalk.com/family/marriage/what-is-the-purpose-of-covenant-marriage.html.

3. Taryn Hillin, “You May Be Surprised by How Many Born-Again Christians Use Ashley Madison.” The Huffington Post, June 4, 2014. Available online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/infidelity-and-religion_n_5447526.

4. Cara C. MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, “Do American States with More Religious or Conservative Populations Search for More Sexual Content on Google?” Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 44 (2015), pp. 137–147.

5. Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, “For Better or for Worse? Gender Ideology, Religious Commitment, and Relationship Quality,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 55, no. 4 (2016), pp. 737–755.

6. Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak, “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 119 (2014), pp. 1002–1046.

7. Sheila Wray Gregoire, The Great Sex Rescue. Grand Rapids, MI: Bakerbooks, 2012.

8. David Frederick et al., “Differences in Orgasm Frequency Between Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2017. Available online at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-017-0939-z.

9. “Spiritual Leadership in the Home.” Focus on the Family. Available online at https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-qa/spiritual-leadership-in-the-home/.