“Marriage sucks!” “
Kill the institution of marriage!”
“It is good for nothing!”
“Marriage is a failure!”
Sounds extreme? Not to Dr. Keith Ablow. He thinks that marriage is “a source of real suffering for the vast majority of married people.” As a matter of fact, that is only one of the accusations Ablow hurls against marriage before eventually calling for its demise. Marriage, he insists, is a dying institution — and he celebrates its death.
You might not know or care of Ablow’s thoughts on the matter but for the fact that he is a psychiatrist and a member of the “Fox News Medical A-Team.” FoxNews.com recently published his assault on marriage, and the essay is sure to gain attention.
Ablow begins by quoting actress Cameron Diaz, who recently asserted that marriage is a “dying institution.” She added this comment: “I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer.”
She reflects a view held by many among the intellectual and cultural elites, among whom marriage has been seen as a retrograde institution for some time.
Keith Ablow adds his hearty approval to Cameron Diaz’s indictment of marriage, adding that he is “not certain marriage ever did suit most people who tried it. From what I hear in my psychiatry office, and from what I hear from other psychiatrists and psychologists, and from what my friends and relatives tell me and show me through their behavior, and from the fact that most marriages end either in divorce or acrimony, marriage is (as it has been for decades now) a source of real suffering for the vast majority of married people.”
He goes on blow after blow: “As a healer, I can’t help looking askance at anything that depletes energy, optimism, mood and passion to the extent that marriage does. It is, without a doubt, one of the leading causes of major depression in the nation.”
Imagine saying that marriages are a leading cause of major depression in the nation! He does not like the idea that government gets involved in marriages. He states, “the involvement of the state in marriage has been a colossal mistake.” Governmental involvement “debases” marriage, which is properly a religious institution. Government involvement renders marriage “sterile, linked to legislation and weighted down with legal implications that are psychologically suffocating.”
He adds this: “Smart, aware people feel consciously or unconsciously disempowered from the moment they say, ‘I do.’”
What Dr. Ablow has forgotten is that the reason why government is involved in marriage is because marriage is granted legal recognition precisely because it is a public declaration with public meaning. But according to Dr. Ablow, the law should not distinguish between single and married persons (or, he offers as well, three cohabitating people), and individuals or couples could merely go to lawyers for contracts as needed.
Well wouldn’t this lead to chaos, both morally and legally? But if the state were to “have no role in marriage, whatsoever,” it would simply mean that the government has decided to call marriage by some other name. Given the realities of human life, some standardized means of recognizing privileged relationships is a necessity. No civilization exists without it. This is true even in societies that separate the religious and legal definitions and authorizations of marriage. There is no major society that exists without marriage, and those rare movements in history that sought to eliminate marriage led to disaster.
But if you think you read enough, check this out: Ablow argues that marriage is dying because of the invention of oral contraceptives. “Once human beings understood that they could express themselves emotionally, romantically and sexually without necessarily creating multiple families and perilously dividing their assets, the psychological pain of living without sexual passion (even by choice) was significantly intensified.”
Keith Ablow is arguing that The Pill offers a chemical means of allowing adultery, and that this is liberation for humanity. Marriage, in his view, kills sexual passion. “The vast, vast majority of men and women, in fact, are no longer physically attracted to their spouses after five or ten years (that’s being kind),” he says. “If they have seen one another most of that time.” Now if this does not discourage you from getting married, nothing will. According to the good doctor, you will lose a physical attraction to your spouse within the first five years of your marriage and wish you were free to fool around.
He doesn’t stop there. Few “normal people” maintain sexual interest in a marriage, he insists. “Human beings just are not built to desire one another once we have flossed in the same room a hundred times and shared a laundry basket for thousands of days.”
Ablow then argues that marriage “inherently deprives men and women of the joy of being ‘chosen’ on a daily basis.” He says that the vows of marriage deprive us of the experience of being chosen by our spouse every single day. Most married people “have to wonder whether their spouses really want to stay, or simply don’t want to go through the hassle of leaving.”
Finally, Dr. Ablow argues that marriage is being undermined by hypocrisy. In his words: “The fact that millions of Americans take vows to stay in marriages for life, then leave those marriages — once, twice, maybe three times — has so trivialized and mocked those vows that many silently chuckle to themselves while listening to them.”
Well, now he is on to something real and important. No one can seriously doubt that this kind of hypocrisy is indeed weakening marriage both as an institution and as a personal commitment.
But here is a point to consider. While it is true that the breaking of the marriage vows weakens marriages both as an institution and families in particular, in a strange way, the hypocrisy actually affirms the importance of marriage and the marital vows. Even those who break their marital vows do so after affirming in public what marriage ought to be and was always meant to be.
The answer to the hypocrisy that Dr. Ablow is speaking of is not to denounce marriage as an institution, but to transform the sinners who are getting married by a personal encounter with Jesus Christ! In other words, it’s those sinners who are giving marriage a bad rap, not marriage itself. And the bible says we are all sinners (Rom. 3:23).
My computer comes with a manual on how to work it. If I don’t follow the instructions written in the manual, it will not operate properly. So when it does not function properly do to my lack of understanding and knowledge of it, should I blame the computer or it is my own inability to read the manual and follow its directions? The answer to hypocrisy is moral correction and a return to integrity in making and keeping the sacred vows of marriage. We do not solve the hypocrisy of the liar by rejecting the very idea of truth.
Coming to the end of his argument, Dr. Ablow insists that the end of marriage is “only a matter of time now.” Marriage is passing away, and we should plan for “what might replace it.” His great goal: “We should come up with something that improves the quality of our lives and those of our children.”
Well, here is what I think about all this. Am I going to take the advice of a sinner, an unredeemed pagan to tell me about happiness, or am I going to listen to the God who wrote the book on happiness known as the Bible? This is a no brainer.
Let sinners wax eloquent on their assessment of marriage. All they are trying to do is to come out from living under the authority of God and to live under their own. We know what the motives are. This is precisely what Lucifer attempted to do and where did that get him? Is he any better off because of his rebellion?
Listen saints, let the world attack marriages all they want. God has ordained it and sanctioned it with His blessing and has also given to us His Word as our guide. If only we obey Him and listen to His carefully written instructions – both husbands and wives, marriages will thrive in a world that’s crumbling all to the glory of God.
