Feb. 7 marked the beginning of National Marriage Week, a period dedicated to the celebration of the joys and benefits of happy and healthy marriages. Since its inception in 1996 in the United Kingdom and its adoption in 2002 in the United States, each annual National Marriage Week has focused on a specific theme central to marriage. This year’s celebration will focus on togetherness in marriage, specifically on how married couples grow, create, and serve together.
But increasingly, our culture looks at “togetherness” with suspicion.
The official National Marriage Week website provides definitions for each of the essential characteristics of a flourishing marriage. Growing together in marriage, couples invest in the wellbeing of each other and their relationship, ensuring a firm foundation for the future. Creating together, couples not only establish a family, but also participate together in configuring the space and culture of their home. Serving together, couples extend their love to their children, neighbors, and broader communities.
Celebrations of National Marriage Week will undoubtedly be marked by local events such as talks, classes, and activities to help couples foster togetherness and to raise awareness about the joys of togetherness in marriage. However, National Marriage Week ought to also serve as a moment of reflection on the contemporary zeitgeist concerning “togetherness” in marriage.
Unsurprisingly, “togetherness” has explicitly or implicitly been the subject of debates about marriage, gender roles, and equality since the latter part of the last century. Viewed with suspicion by some, the “togetherness” of marriage seems for both sexes more a signifier of spousal inequality than equality.
Rather than a mutual bond of love, “being together” in marriage is perceived as an institution where wives are ultimately reduced to emotional anchors and laborers while their husbands experience benefits at their expense. Writing from the presumption that marriage is defined by women conditioned to earn love by agreeableness and men via achievement, one commentator asserts that those bonds that might be described as “being together” is merely dependency disguised as partnership.
While only 34% of women are seeking marriage compared to 54% of men, popular male voices about marriage suggest an equally negative perception of partnership. For example, “manosphere” bloggers such as Andrew Tate launch bizarre invectives against marriage, claiming that marriage is useless for men and that they should indulge themselves in money, physical prowess, and casual sex.
In online spaces, “incels” communicate amongst each other in a confusing lingua ignota, consuming supposedly enlightening “blackpills” about “femoids” (their chosen term for women) being untrustworthy and adulterous social climbers who will always abandon “normie” men.
With anxiety, defensiveness, and even hate defining the attitudes de jour toward marriage, it might be unsurprising that in 2006, 50% of young adults said it was important to marry, while in 2020 only 29% believe marriage is important.
These varied lambastes against marriage—all fundamentally grounded in some perception of what defines “being together” in marriage—indicate the ultimate problem: nobody knows what love is.
Pushing through cultural diatribes, we ought to focus on what “being together” really means. It is certainly not use of the other for material gain, the subjugation of one’s dignity by the other, or a trivial and temporary bond. To understand the real nature of the bonds of marriage, we ought to first look back at those who laid down the seedbeds for the modern institution as we understand it today.
Consider the words of Aristotle, who in the “Nicomachean Ethics” said that the desire for marriage is a “natural feeling” and that men and women come together “not only to get children, but to provide whatever is necessary to a fully lived life…[where] their own special excellence…may be a source of happiness to both.”
How should these visions of marriage influence real human behavior between spouses “being together”?
According to the Institute for Family Studies, real fulfillment from marital “togetherness” is brought about by mutual commitment and effort to grow ties between spouses, real empathy and support, and compassionate concern and care for the other. Behaviors such as acts of kindness, forgiveness, and spending time together form the basis of “high-connection” marriages. Notably, “high-connection” couples have higher rates of life satisfaction (60%) than those who lack those traits.
Moreover, couples who are equally involved in cultivating their home life—whether through sharing roles and responsibilities or sharing in being parents together—experience high degrees of marital satisfaction.
Research also indicates that strong social networks, community involvement and interdependence are key to happy marriages. Couples involved in their communities not only feel greater stability and happiness together, but they also feel greater fulfillment as couples integrated into their communities.
The themes of this year’s National Marriage Week’s focus—growing together, creating together, and serving together—are timely. In an age in which individuals are failing to see how marriage might directly benefit them, perhaps it time men and women start asking how they might benefit together—and thus benefit each other. “Togetherness,” properly understood, is far from a burden, but rather one of the greatest joys of marriage.