That we live in a world where people murder their partners (very often, their wives) even this often is crushing to me.
It seems that, despite all the problems and pain in marriages, murder should be something that is almost unheard of.
By way of armchair explanation that I feel obligated to make for my own "peace of mind," it seems to me that we (as a society, but also many Christians I've known, and I don't exclude myself) are grossly abusing the idea of marriage.
If it's a convenience and a holdover, a kind of legal arrangement that just makes inheritance easier, then I don't see why it's celebrated with such pomp, or can be.
If it's for the procreation of children, as is often said in certain contexts...well, then it's pointless, because children can and do appear without any marriage contract or legal arrangement or blessing at all.
If it's the "only way" to get "sexual activity" "blessed," then at least in my own communion, I'm not sure what's going on, because the marriage rite is so late, and for normal people, even later. Then we hear that the Church recognized civil marriages before that...so, why not now, if everything is so unchanging? Or, in our case, we recognize civil marriages that predate someone's conversion, but then discourage people already in the Church from marrying outside it, or even forbid them? Completely unclear to me.
It seems that there is a mix of things in play: a desire for intimacy and pair-bonding, a desire for sex that doesn't get you yelled at, and then various desires by forces outside the relationship to make sure that the energies of that relationship are appropriately channelled.
And then you have various holdover notions, no longer closely related to reality, such as that the man is responsible for grabbing gobs of money and hurling them into the woman's pockets so she can choose the right wallpaper for the upbringing of children.
Or that the woman is responsible for caring for (and qualified to care for) the emotionally eggshell-like man who is so destroyed by X Y and Z that he's all but crippled and needs to be carried by his wife.
Or the relatively new notion that your partner is supposed to be "everything" to you and that you should both be too embarrassed by your kitchen ever to have anyone over, so you just go into a cocoon and suffer together, taking everything out on each other. Any opposite-sex relationship outside the marriage is "cheating" or "dangerous" and any same-sex relationship is somehow suspicious because your partner is probably talking about you!
This isn't the best post.
