Do You Take…
I grew up in post–World War II, small-town America where people, by and large, stayed married.

It was a world of next-door neighbors, backyard barbecues, bicycles, and best buddies. My sisters and brothers and I were on a first-name basis with our parents’ close friends, often calling them “Aunt Martha Lee” and “Uncle George” even though they weren’t kin to us.

It was a safe and predictable place where children could be confident that the same cast of characters who showed up at the breakfast table in the morning would gather around the dinner table at night. Bedtime stories and good-night kisses were standard fare. I look back on it now and marvel that I took it all so much for granted.

Yet why wouldn’t I? We didn’t know anyone who was divorced back then, except Daddy’s cousin Lucille from Texas, who only came home for weddings and funerals. I don’t remember ever hearing the term broken home as a child.3

How sheltered I was…and how blessed. What a different world my grandchildren are growing up in today. The tentacles of divorce touch virtually every family and church in this country. Sadly, five of every ten marriages in America today end in divorce. And, sadder still, only one or two couples of the five who remain intact will achieve the level of emotional, physical, and spiritual commitment within marriage that we have come to think of as true intimacy.2

Why, then, when marriage has this abysmal track record, do couples continue to marry? In the movie Shall We Dance?, the character Bev Clark— played by Susan Sarandon—asks a question very much like that and then answers her...