In case you didn’t hear, the starting tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs proposed to his girlfriend, a singer, recently. Maybe your household heard that news with glee, or maybe an eye roll. But look: Media hysterics notwithstanding, marriage is pretty great. Good, wonderful even, for them. Fame and riches are perilous wedding guests, but it’s in the best interest of many, born and unborn, for their covenant to endure.
Marriage is great, and it’s something a lot of people are missing out on. Readers of this Substack know that marriage and fertility rates across the West are down, even dangerously so. It often feels like the sexes are alienated from one another: isolated in increasingly partisan media and lifestyle bubbles, distrustful of each other, and “blackpilled” about the possiblity of meaningful intimacy. What has caused this is the topic of many other posts on this space, and many better treatments across books and blogs.
I’m not revisiting systemic causes today. Instead, I want to offer ten reasons why every man should get married. By “every” I mean “almost every,” and by “get” married I mean “try to get married.” The exceptions are as real as they are biblical. The gift of celibacy is a gift from God and not to be thrown away lightly. The providence of God cannot be disregarded either. There are men whose desires and callings do not align with marriage, and men whose opportunities haven’t either. This is not to necessarily discourage those men.
But I sometimes wonder if we’re too focused on the exceptions. These are seven reasons I think the majority of men should pursue marriage, and they are the closest things to universals I can get. Whether you’re more like Travis Kelce or Travis Bickle, marriage is an objectively good, even mind blowingly good, thing. The Hallmark Channel didn’t invent it. God did. And what God makes tends to fit us in ways nothing else will.
Marriage is for sex, and married sex comes with no shame or regret.
Don’t be put off by this being first. This is not a list of cosmic importance. But it is a list meant to deal realistically with how we men experience our lives. Just like the desire for food points to the reality of nutrition, the desire we all experience for a woman’s body points to the reality of becoming one-flesh. Unmarried sex is destructive and hurtful. Its pleasures last only as long as the orgasm, and its problems persist long after.
Because of this, some men in the online world even look down on sex. They see it as a problem, a threat to Stoic perfection. This is a predictable outcome in a sexually broken society (a friend describes our cultural religion as sexualism). But married sex is bliss. It’s beautiful. It’s tender. It’s a slow walk hand-in-hand, not a sprint to see who gets what they want first. Married sex, if you do it right, will not make you stupid or lazy or ashamed or devoid of self-control. It will make you strong, caring, attentive, and full.
A wife is an irreplaceable friend
Not necessarily “buddy,” but a friend. A friend who might not share all your interests or want to hear all you think is interesting. But there are levels of friendship deeper than simply nodding along. The friendship of not going away. The friendship of being willing to listen when you really need to say something. The friendship of knowing what you’re thinking before you know it yourself. A wife is an irreplaceable friend, not because she takes the place of other men, but because knowing and being known in this way recalibrates every other friendship.
Marriage makes you more motivated.
You might know the data: Married men tend to earn more. Let me suggest one reason (not the only reason) for this: There is no motivation quite like marriage.
You might want to improve yourself. You might want to make more money so you can live in a better apartment or buy better stuff. You might want to earn another degree so you can go up the ladder. But this is different than knowing someone is invested in you. Personally. She might be dependent on your perseverance, your diligence, your initiative. Maybe she’s not dependent on it. But she is invested in it. The look on your wife’s face when you know she’s genuinely proud of you is not something any college or influencer can give you. There’s a wholeness to your sense of purpose that comes from it. And it’s pure. It won’t rise or fall depending how good you do. But it’s there, and you’ll know it’s there, and it light fires you didn’t know were there.
Marriage brings you out of yourself.
We men need to get out of our own head. We need to stop plumbing the depths of our own mental caves. Virtually nothing is better at this than marriage.
Sometimes we tend to think we are worthless. But consider: What kind of man can you be for your wife when you think that? There’s only so much positivity can do for you. What can really wake you up to war against despair is the realization that this woman needs you to get out of bed, to fight the dragons, and think of yourself the way you would think of her.
In marriage, it’s not just you anymore. You can’t pull the shades and block the world out. You can’t run from risk or dodge disapointment. You gotta get out there, because you’re not your own. And this isn’t just a one time realization. It’s a rhythm of love that heals over time, as you practice again and again the art of coming out of yourself.
Marriage is a lot of fun.
It really is! It’s like the most perfect recreation ever created, with a supernatural blend of routine, spontaneity, danger, safety, humor, grief, highs, and lows. They haven’t invented a sport or a hobby that gives you an adventure like a wife. Gone is the safety of being on your own, but gone too is the frightful anxiety that safety might be all you have.
Marriage is about heaven.
It’s not how you get to heaven. And there’s no marriage in heaven. But marriage is about heaven. If you want to know, really know, why God created this world, marriage gives you a big part of the answer. A husband, stretching out his arms on a cross for a bride whom he loves: this story is at the center of the universe. When you take on a wife, and when you lay down your life every day for that covenant, you play the same note that’s playing in every strain of every atom in every corner of existence.
Marriage makes children—the greatest economy in the world.
We can mourn for those whose bodies or journeys kept them from this particular blessing. Again, the providence of God cannot be disregarded. But in his providence, marriage leads to sex, and sex leads to children. Life. Future. Not just the cute little gremlins that run around, but the great grandchildren who will be seeing the same world you see through their eyes. Apart from being a Christian, no membership anchors you so firmly in the future of the world than the membership of fatherhood. Long after your job title has been given to another, your sports records have been forgotten, your money and house and cars gone the way of all the earth—your life will reverberate through the lives you and your wife made.
So men, under the providence of God, and for his glory in your life and the lives of unborn thousands: You should really try to get married.
Perhaps it's because I am old (a grandfather, no less), or maybe because of the certain slant of my own spirituality, but I found the seven reasons missing I suppose what I would call "Truth in Advertising." Here, two items come to mind.
First, Stuff Happens. The real benefit of marriage for both men and women is that when Stuff does happen there's someone else there, there's a relationship, strained as it is that can help you process. This is the stuff of intimacy over time; it's not just friendship or sex (though sometimes that is the only way of seeming to negotiate or survive), it's a sort of persistence that builds shared memories, that can hold you together, or perhaps stop a fall. Stuff Happens to everyone, even the best, and Marriage helps you manage it.
Second, Marriage is a Spiritual Gym. It's where we can actually train in living as a Christians. To live with someone closely, intimately means that we are confronted with ourselves. We are also invited to be open to the other person, to give ourselves. It's a matter of fighting the Self. Spiritually, this can only happen when the relationship is held by covenant. Marriage, it seems, offers the possibility of becoming somebody (spiritually) better.
I appreciate your courage to write a piece like this - especially when the comments section is included :). And it's good to see you back in the saddle writing.
That said, I wonder if the piece might be different if written with the wife as the primary beneficiary of a marriage. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it seems that guy "gets" something in every reason you list, whereas in Christianity, the greatest benefit in marriage is the giving.
Put differently: if I'm sitting down with a Christian guy who asks to marry my daughter, and I ask him why he wants to be married, what should I think if he gives me these reasons?