Commitment and Fidelity
one
Being Limited to “Just One”
The Catholic Church has been the world’s great and perhaps only real champion of monogamy.
We say you get to pick one person to join with until one of you dies.
Other religions are almost without exception polygamous. They assume that a man cannot limit himself to one woman. The Jews of the Old Testament, the ancient pagans, the Muslims, the Mormons – you name it. They all say a man should be able to have more than one woman. And in some ways, as the famous novelist Sigrid Unset said, the other Christians who allow for divorce are even worse.
In a system of pagan polygamy, the man is still required to support his old wife even after he acquires a new, younger one. But when other Christians began allowing divorce, especially no-fault divorce, a man could just wash his hands of his old wife whenever he wanted a new one.
Now in the secular world, they’re trying to push this thing called “open marriage,” which is really not a marriage at all, since it doesn’t even try to be exclusive.
It’s all the same old idea. People don’t want to commit. Men, and young men especially, don’t want to be “tied down”. They don’t want to get stuck with just one person. And the Church says, “Don’t be afraid. Give your life away. Your whole life. It’s what you were made for.”
two
Commitment and Excellence and Love
Everyone knows that unless you commit to something, you can never get good at it.
Unless you commit to learning guitar, no matter how difficult or frustrating or discouraging it can be, you will not get good at guitar. If every week, or month, or even year, you switch to a different musical instrument, you’ll never get good at any of them.
It’s horrifying to see a young man irresolutely switching from one college major to another, or from one career path to another, or from one girlfriend to another. It’s horrifying because you know that unless he commits, he’ll never get anywhere, never amount to anything, never do anything worthwhile with this one chance at life he’s been given.
Everything requires commitment to get good at it. And that includes love. It takes a lifetime to learn how to fully love just one woman. And that’s why you need to dedicate your life to getting good at it. That’s what the marriage vow is.
three
Getting stuck with one person, or getting stuck in the same spot in life?
People, and again, especially men, are always worried that they’re going to get stuck with just one person. Well sure, if that’s how you want to say it, that’s exactly what marriage is. It’s the decision to bind yourself to another person for life. It’s the foundation for the most happiness that this life has to offer.
But what people don’t realize is that getting stuck with just one person is the only way to avoid getting stuck in just one stage of life.
If a man dedicates himself to just one woman, he goes through all the stages life has to offer: romance, marriage, the miracle of seeing his children born, the complexities and challenges and beauties of raising brand new people the world has never seen before, the astonishment of becoming friends with your own children, being grandparents, and approaching the next life hand-in-hand with the person you’ve spent this life with.
If a man never commits to a woman, if he just goes from one woman to another, he’ll spend his whole life in the same adolescent immaturity of his late teenage years. He’ll watch his life go by, and his body go to pieces, and he’ll lose all the pleasures of adolescence even though he has acquired none of the richness a full human life has to offer.
So who has really gotten stuck? The man with a lifetime of love and new experiences and challenges and rewards? Or the guy who never grew up, but then had to get old and die just the same?
four
Getting Bored with Each Other
When you get married, you never get “stuck” in some boring routine. It’s the exact opposite: when you marry someone, you’re boarding a roller-coaster that will keep you guessing till the very end. But what about when spouses get “bored” with each other? Doesn’t that ever happen?
Sure it does. But not because the other person is boring. It’s because you have gotten lazy and stopped paying attention.
GK Chesterton said that the world will never perish from a lack of wonders, but from a lack of wonder. And the same thing goes within a marriage.
The truth is that you don’t find something or someone boring because you know too much, but because you know too little.
Someone who just knows the basic rules of baseball is never surprised by a baseball game. They just figure that whatever happens is normal. But people who have been committed to baseball for their whole lives, they’re always saying things like, “I’ve been watching this game for forty years, I never saw anything like that.”
They know enough to be interested. They know enough to be excited. They know enough to pay attention to all the really surprising things that are going on.
Your wife or husband is a lot more complicated, and a lot more important than a baseball game. So don’t tell me you’re bored with him or her.
Your spouse is a child of God destined for glory or for an eternity of horrific torture in Hell. Christ is so in love with your spouse that He died for Him or Her. There has never been anyone quite like your spouse before in the whole course of human history, and there never will be again. In other words, your spouse is not boring. God Himself, an infinite intelligence, is interested in your spouse.
So if you’re bored with your spouse, it’s not because of your spouse. It’s because you’ve stopped paying attention.
five
Love and Commitment and the Greatest Possible Happiness This Life has to Offer
The Church wants you to be happy. She knows the only way for you to be happy is to be excellent at love. The only way to become excellent in love, like the only way to become excellent at anything else, is to commit.
You either become excellent at loving a woman by committing your life to just her in marriage or you become excellent at loving the Church by committing your life to just the Church in celibacy.
This is the commitment that prevents your whole life from being stunted, unfulfilled, uninteresting. It gives you the chance to experience all the love this life has to offer. And then it leads you to the infinite love of the next life.