I wrote once that today’s sins are mere justifications of past sins. I only realized what that truly means this afternoon. Two people where I’ve been volunteering had an argument, and one said it was why they knew they couldn’t live together: it showed each would kill the other! Then I remarked to the closer one, “This was why the Old Morality forbade cohabitating before marriage.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t live together, and then you get married, you don’t find out you can’t live together until it’s too late.”
“Cohabitators are more likely to ruin their marriage before it begins,” I said. I was probably too stiff; “That’s what the studies show.” If there weren’t more work to do, maybe I would have stayed to answer whatever she may have said. Something tells me I angered her, at least a little <This hunch is confusing. Her talk <Self-disclosure, on and on!> about her own life sounds like she doesn’t have a stake in this view>. But whenever something like this comes up, I always have to go over why I’m so sure. If she’s right, why did divorce rates go up after people started cohabitating? If she’s right, why did God forbid something that would make life easier on His creatures <After the New Law>? <Have I misread her religious views all this time?> It wouldn’t be enough for me to note that people can figure out whether they could live together without trying to first. She made that point with her joke. There’s something about being stuck with the consequences if you make a mistake that gets people to be careful. People could discuss things with their marriage prospects frankly and honestly, and know whether they could live together or not. I’m sure they were more likely to do it back when divorce was both painful and difficult to achieve.
Instead, now they talk about what something’s meant to do <Is it really meant to do that?> instead of what it actually means. How can they understand why things don’t work out if they don’t look for the cause? Living together without commitment so you can leave if things ‘don’t work out’ takes it for granted that they wouldn’t, and assumes that commitment doesn’t make a difference in the first place. If it did change things, an experiment that leaves it out couldn’t tell you what things would be like if you kept it in. The mere habit of foregoing commitment may keep people from truly committing later on, and the temptation to withhold commitment because there was no compelling reason to take it seriously must be very real. If people thought about these things, the world’s women would see they’re being taken advantage of, and maybe the men, too. What kind of ‘marriage-prep’ is that?
But here I am. I’m trying to be so clinical about this, just like Desmond always complains. And still, I keep going back to that suspicion. Did I hurt her somehow? Why should I take blame for reminding people of what they already know? If they get defensive over the truth, that’s their fault. It’s silly of me to feel hurt by the possibility of giving others sore feelings when they need them. <But what if telling people about what they’re running away from makes it more likely they won’t go back to it when they see why God drew the line where He did?> On the other hand, could it be that what’s cutting me deep here is seeing people insist on things that harm them, and watching them double down on it? I’m stuck.
What say you?