Marriage Mondays: Who's Selling Marriage?

If you're listening to popular culture at all, you'll notice that marriage is sensational. Not that it's just "wonderful, amazing, a mystery, or awesome." Marriage is "sensational" in that it's being marketed as drama to capture the attention and passions of a distant, watching public for the purpose of financial game.  

Our world is selling marriage. 

For some strange reason, marital meltdowns with names like "Kardashian" and "Kutcher" are being peddled on national news forums, taking up the air waves and vicariously feeding the American sense of excitement.  In the process, marriage is gradually being marketed and bought as something temporary, cheap, and unfaithful. The perception of what a marital union is has been falling apart, piece by piece. And it's influencing us.  It's influencing our children. News of a 72 day marriage brings chuckles, jokes, or sarcasm.  USA Today reported that the flimsy union isn't even expected to "tarnish" the Kardashian brand; we don't mind. We've gotten so used to the cheap branding that such news hardly brings "grief." 


Many may gasp or say "what a shame," but we still find ourselves spellbound by the selling of marriage on a grand, sensationally marketed scale. We've joined in the selling of marriage as watchers and consumers.


We know that God first made marriage (Genesis 2:18-25) and set the pattern for how it should look. He gave the definition, wrote the rules, and put limits on the drama (Matthew 19:6). In typical "man fashion," people today take marriage and twist it into something that will sell.  People want sin. Even a lot of us who claim to follow Jesus want to just "watch" some sin. It appears that faithfulness, gentleness, long suffering, purity, and humility don't turn much of a profit. 


And if it isn't enough to slowly buy into the subtle selling of a counterfeit version of what God made, many are going a step further. Many married women (and scores of others who dream of being married) have been swept up into a story of love (Do Vampires really go with love?) that's essentially dangerous, forbidden, unwise, and even violent. Since when did we long for love characterized by violence and intimacy fed by passion that fights the urge to consume and destroy?  I know a lot of broken women who would say that relationships like that are, in reality, abusive. = Hardly romantic.


Our culture is selling a version of marriage, but it's a far cry from the one God made and promoted long ago and still creates today. It's hard enough to try and experience the miracle of two becoming one without countering the good with a lot of confusion from what the world is selling. If we really do long for God's kind of marriage, we would do well to leave the world's feast off of our mental plate. And if we really long for God's kind of marriage in our child's future, we would do well to leave the world's imposter out of our "buy into" list. Marriage is better than that.

Marriage IS truly sensational! Let's keep treating it that way.