Week # 2: Does Marriage and Family Matter?

Does Marriage and Family Matter?

I am beginning this blog on the importance of marriage and family to share why I believe marriage and family need to be protected and saved.  I believe that marriage and the family is the fundamental unit of society and the best way for people to have true love, joy, safety, success, stability, and peace in their lives.  I believe as stated in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World, “that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”

·      Don’t Give up, Fight for your Marriage!

·         Elder Oaks teaches, “I strongly urge you and those who advise you to face up to the reality that for most marriage problems, the remedy is not divorce but repentance. Often the cause is not incompatibility but selfishness. The first step is not separation but reformation. Divorce is not an all-purpose solution, and it often creates long-term heartache. A broad-based international study of the levels of happiness before and after “major life events” found that, on average, persons are far more successful in recovering their level of happiness after the death of a spouse than after a divorce. Spouses who hope that divorce will resolve conflicts often find that it aggravates them, since the complexities that follow divorce—especially where there are children—generate new conflicts”(2012). 

·      Personal Experience- My husband and I are fighters! 

We have faced our share of difficulties.  The first tragedy we faced was the loss of our second child, a stillborn baby boy.  This was devastating for us.  However, we clung to our religious beliefs that we would see him again and to each other.  

A year later we were faced with a job loss and other serious marital problems, which caused us to move in with my parents.  However, we fought for our family.  We attended marriage therapy for a year, prayed everyday for help and strength and attended the temple every week for months. Then two years later serious challenges struck again.  My Husband has OCD and depression, which flared up big time.  This caused some very serious struggles.  Again we fought for our family.  We prayed, fasted, and sought support and professional help.  We clung to each other.  Eventually things got too tough for my husband and me to handle.  We ended up being separated for about 6 months.  However, during this time we worked to strengthen ourselves. I returned to school and my husband made big changes.  Today we are together and stronger than ever. 

I can personally testify that President Kimball’s words are true. He taught: “Two individuals approaching the marriage altar must realize that to attain the happy marriage which they hope for they must know that marriage … means sacrifice, sharing, and even a reduction of some personal liberties. It means long, hard economizing. It means children who bring with them financial burdens, service burdens, care and worry burdens; but also it means the deepest and sweetest emotions of all.”

 I would never change the things my husband and I have gone through.  They have made us stronger better people and have unified us.  I truly believe that it is through marriage that we learn and grow the most and become closer to our Savior, Jesus Christ.  I know from personal experience that if couples work together to be better people individually and as a couple, forgive each other, and apply the atonement in their lives every day they can have a marriage beyond joy for time and all eternity and their children will be blessed beyond measure.  I fight for my marriage and family because I know that my marriage and family have eternal value and I want us to be together forever, not just til death do us part.  We already have one of us waiting for us in heaven.  We will make it to him.  

Here are some statistics and information about how devastating Divorce is for couples, children, and society as a whole, and why marriage is so important.  We live in a world where marriage is becoming less and less sacred and special. 

Many people think marriage is just a personal preference. 

·      However, The State of our Unions states, “Marriage is not merely a private arrangement; it is also a complex social institution. Marriage helps to unite the needs and desires of couples and the children their unions produce. Because marriage fosters small cooperative unions—otherwise known as stable families—it not only enables children to thrive, but also shores up communities, helping family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times” (The State of the Unions, 2012). 

o   I love the following great story Elder Todd. D. Christofferson shared, “Above the Great West Door of the renowned Westminster Abbey in London, England, stand the statues of 10 Christian martyrs of the 20th century. Included among them is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant German theologian born in 1906.1 Bonhoeffer became a vocal critic of the Nazi dictatorship and its treatment of Jews and others. He was imprisoned for his active opposition and finally executed in a concentration camp. Bonhoeffer was a prolific writer, and some of his best-known pieces are letters that sympathetic guards helped him smuggle out of prison, later published as Letters and Papers from Prison.  One of those letters was to his niece before her wedding. It included these significant insights: “Marriage is more than your love for each other. … In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his kingdom. In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man. … So love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God.”

The State of the Unions also states that divorce is causing the loss of the middle class in America. 

·      It states, “Middle America are growing up without stable families to help them weather economic change, deregulation, and globalization. The loss of social opportunity for these children and their families, and the national cost to taxpayers when stable families fail to form—about $112 billion annually, or more than $1 trillion per decade, by one cautious estimate—are significant” (The State of the Unions, 2012). 

Lack of marriage and the prevalence of divorce in America cost us greatly, but not only financially. 
 

·      Amato found that, “ Research clearly demonstrates that children growing with two continuously married parents are less likely than other children to experience a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and social problems, not only during childhood, but also into adulthood.” 

·      He shared research that found that children who are from divorced families, or born out of wedlock repeat grades, are suspended from school, participate in delinquent behaviors, violence, therapy, have smoked in the last month, have had thoughts of suicide, or attempted suicide at higher percentages than children who live in homes with both married biological parents. 

Some people think that cohabitation is just as good as marriage if the couple is committed to each other. 

·      Research has found that, “Children are less likely to thrive in cohabiting households, compared to intact, married families. On many social, educational, and psychological outcomes, children in cohabiting households do significantly worse than children in intact, married families, and about as poorly as children living in single-parent families. And when it comes to abuse, recent federal data indicate that children in cohabiting households are markedly more likely to be physically, sexually, and emotionally abused than children in both intact, married families and single-parent families” (The State of our Unions, 2012). 

Finally, many couples that divorce are less happy after divorce than when they were married

·      “One study found “no evidence that divorce or separation typically made adults happier than staying in an unhappy marriage. Two out of three unhappily married adults who avoided divorce reported being happily married five years later” (Oaks, 2007).

Divorce is needed at times. 

•  Elder Oaks shared, “We know that many of you are innocent victims—members whose former spouses persistently betrayed sacred covenants or abandoned or refused to perform marriage responsibilities for an extended period. Members who have experienced such abuse have firsthand knowledge of circumstances worse than divorce” (Oaks, 2012.) 

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References

Christofferson, D. T. (April 2015), Why marriage, why family.  Ensign.

Oaks, D.H. (May 2007). Divorce. Ensign.

State of Our Unions 2012; The National Marriage Project. (Note: Carefully read pages 1–13 and 61–103; you may skim pages 13-60)

Amato, P. (Fall, 2005). The impact of family formation change on the cognitive, social, and emotional well-being of the next generation. The Future of Children, 15(2), 75-96.