As always my encouragement is to reach out and help others and seek wholeness and healing. I cannot stress enough the importance of counseling! Get involved at your churches and keep educating the world about the pain of divorce and being a single mom. Pour all you can into your kids, as they are the innocent bystanders in all this.
I have been blessed in so many ways with all the Lord has taught me in this season. I will continue to seek the Lord for direction for my life and family.

Thank you.

Katie Schmidt

Noah was a drunk, Abraham was too old, Isaac was a daydreamer,
Jacob was a liar, Leah was ugly, Joseph was abused, Moses had a
stuttering problem, Gideon was afraid, Sampson had long hair and was
a womanizer, Rahab was a prostitute, Jeremiah and Timothy were too
young, David had an affair and was a murderer, Elijah was
suicidal, Isaiah preached naked, Jonah ran from God, Naomi was a
widow, Job went bankrupt, John the Baptist ate bugs, Peter denied
Christ, The Disciples fell asleep while praying, Martha worried
about everything, The Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once,
Zaccheus was too small, Paul was too religious, Timothy had an
ulcer… AND Lazarus was dead!

No more excuses now!! God can use you to your full potential.

“Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don’t drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out.”

1. James 1:12

“Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.”

The cruelest world
The coldest heart
The deepest wound
The endless dark
The lonely ache
The burning tears
The bitter nights
The wasted years

Life breaks and falls apart
But we know these are
Places where grace is soon to be so amazing
It may be unfulfilled
It may be unrestored
But when anything that’s shattered is laid before the Lord
Just watch and see
It will not be unredeemed

For every choice that led to shame
And all the love that never came
For every vow that someone broke
And every lie that gave up hope
We live in the shadow of the fall
But the cross says these are all
Places where grace is soon to be so amazing
It may be unfulfilled
It may be unrestored
But when anything that’s shattered is laid before the Lord
Just watch and see
It will not be unredeemed

Places where grace is soon to be so amazing
It may be unfulfilled
It may be unrestored
But you never know the miracle the Father has in store
Just watch and see
It will not be
Just watch and see
It will not be unredeemed

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you oass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

By the Side of the Road
By :Ellen

I just got back from my uncle’s funeral in Chicago yesterday and have to go down to Greenfield, IN to pick up my kids. I hit a huge, silver object in the road (didn’t have time to swerve) and thought to myself, “Hmmm, I hope that didn’t do any permanent damage on my car!” I got to McDonald’s and looked at my tire…it looked low but not flat. My husband hands me 50 cents and says, “Go fill it up with air at the station. You have Triple A right? Well then, you should be fine” and drives off. I make it down the road w/ my two kids who are an absolute wreck after being at their dad’s and a guy in the lane next to me honks and says, “You have a flat tire”. Damn! I knew it, I thought! So I turned into this abandoned newspaper parking lot. Sure enough, it was totally flat. My immediate thought was to panic, so I called my mom and Katie. Katie is amazing at finding people to help and I knew I would be taken care of regardless. I called AAA and they said they could be there in a hour. As my two kids were crawling across the parking lot I started to get a tear in my eye. I also got very angry with my dad for taking his own life. Where was anyone to protect us? There we were by the side of the road and I didn’t have a dad to call upon for help and protection. My husband texted me later and said, “Do you want me to come? I can if you need me”. Say what? You shouldn’t even have to ask! “You are their dad”, I thought. Why wouldn’t you immediately turn around and make sure we are ok?

My mom, who is a widow, was cutting her own tree branches yesterday. The branches were quite large for a 4”10 woman to be cutting by herself. I looked at her with a look of injustice and said, “Mom it isn’t supposed to be this way. You are supposed to have a man step in for you and help you. Out of anyone I know YOU deserve someone to look after you and care for you b/c of your faithfulness to Him.” She looked back at me and said, “Honey, I’ve learned that if I don’t do it myself, it won’t ever get done.” I now understand why James 1:27 is so true. PURE and UNDEFILED religion is helping widows and orphans (btw have you noticed how many stories there are about widows in the bible?). There is no worse feeling than being stranded with 2 kids and everyone passes you by. No one helps you. No one cares. We have grown complacent to the needs of others (myself included).

Just the other week my uncle passed away. His death has been such a blow to this family. I learned at the funeral that as a single man he gave up his dream job in Texas to move to Indy to “watch over” his sister, my mom. This man wasn’t even a Christian at the time and I can’t think of a more selfless act to do for a grieving widow. Now without him, I have my ALS dying uncle, an uncle in St. Louis, a brother-in-law in North Carolina, and a grandpa with Alzheimer’s in St. Louis. Those are all the men that are left in my family. Truly it is complete dependence upon God at this point for both my mom and me.

But God did provide for me last night. AAA showed up for me after an hour, we were safe, Katie’s new husband graciously drove down and followed me all the way home….AND Katie’s dad took my car for me today and is checking out my tires. I know God does not promise us an easy life, but He does promise to take care of us (Hebrews 13:5).

Thank you all for praying for me. My mom stopped to pray for me immediately when she heard I was all alone (as she knows how this feels). I believe that’s why we were safe as it was getting to be dark. I know I am not good at a lot of things in life, but if I’ve learned ANYTHING it’s just as it says in Proverbs 20:6, “Many a man claims to have unfailing love, but a faithful man who can find?” I’ve been abandoned enough times in my life to know you don’t leave someone. You stay with them even when it gets so hard that you can’t bear it. If we follow this principle, I believe we will have treasure in heaven someday. More treasure than we can even fathom now.

Prayer:
Lord, thank you for showing me that there is no greater call in this life than to be a servant. Your son Jesus was a servant. Help me to be more like Him. Lord, I choose to surrender all to You… whatever little left I have that is. Thank you for being patient with me and loving me.

You saw real lives and real pain. I could relate with all of these women. The names and lives are different but the abuse and the tactics are the same. I am undone before the Lord. I know this grieves His heart more than mine. It is 4 am as I write this. I cannot sleep due to many reasons, the main is the pain by my right eye. That is where my ex got his final hit to my body. The dr.’s say the daily pain is nerve damage and nothing can be done. It hurts, but after what I have seen done to others, I am lucky. Lucky this is the worst of it and lucky I got out. The physical pain hurts….but the emotional scars are the hard ones. I still doubt myself all the time and question my worth. My ex was great about making me feel like I was less than everyone.

My cry to God is to bring healing. To me and to all the women walking this. I pray they come to know and truly feel God as their father and husband. That HE is the lover of their soul, their strong tower, their ever present help in EVERY time of need. I pray that we all dig deeply into the Lord and seek His face. I pray we seek healing and wholeness that we can only attain in Christ. But I ask that we reach past ourselves and serve others. I now know that God uses EVERYTHING….yes, everything for His glory. It is so powerful to love and care as Christ did. I want my mind on the things His mind were on…...I want the junk that grieved Him to be the stuff the grieves me.

This is my prayer at 4 am. Join me.

Lord my God,

Two sites to hit up. http://www.sinbysilence.com and http://www.every9seconds.com

Powerful. Go and Be changed!

See You Sept. 1!

I was so helpless
Where did the light go
I had no hope left
Deep down in my soul
I was watchin’
I was waitin’
I was prayin’
I was stayin’ down on my knees
That’s right where You found me

My Deliverer, You rescued me from all that held me captive
My Deliverer, You set me free
Now I’m alive and I can live
So every moment I will give you praise
My Deliverer
Ooh my Deliverer

There’s no pretending
I can’t do it myself
I’m so dependent
Lord I need Your help
I’ll be watchin’
I’ll be waitin’
I’ll be prayin’
I’ll be stayin’ down on my knees
That’s right where You’ll find me

My Deliverer, You rescued me from all that held me captive
My Deliverer, You set me free
Now I’m alive and I can live
And every moment I will give you praise

La la la la la I need You
You know whatever I’m goin’ through
I’ll be watchin’
I’ll be waitin’
I’ll be prayin’
I’ll be stayin’ down on my knees
That’s right where You’ll find me

My Deliverer, You rescued me from all that held me captive
My Deliverer, You set me free
Now I can live
My Deliverer, I’m no longer captive
My Deliverer, You gave Your life that I might live
So every moment I will give you praise
Yeah my Deliverer
I’m gonna give You praise
I’m gonna give You praise
My Deliverer

Cheating 2.0: New Mobile Apps Make Adultery Easier
By Jeremy Caplan

Two-timing politicians, take note: cheating has never been easier. AshleyMadison.com, a personals site designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, now boasts slick iPhone and Blackberry versions that help married horndogs find like-minded cheaters within minutes. The new tools are aimed at tech-savvy adulterers wary of leaving tracks on work or home computers. Because the apps are loaded up from phones’ browsers, they leave no electronic trail that suspicious spouses can trace.

Even as public outrage boils up over the infidelity of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Nevada Senator John Ensign, millions of Americans are sneaking online to do some surreptitious cheating of their own.
Unlike Craigslist’s plain-Jane listings, AshleyMadison lets cheaters customize profiles, chat anonymously and trade messages about adulterous preferences — all in an effort to make cheating as simple as using Match.com.
The formula is working. AshleyMadison’s membership has doubled over the past year to 4 million. The Toronto-based site, which takes its name from the two most popular female names in 2001, the year it launched, enjoyed another big boost this week, following Father’s Day, when CEO Noel Biderman says men often feel underappreciated. Traffic to the site tripled on Monday. (Biderman says there’s a similar boost in interest from neglected wives and girlfriends after Valentine’s Day.)
Over the past month alone, 679,000 men and women have used the service to contact a cheating partner. According to their profiles, 92% of males on the site are married or otherwise attached, as are 60% of female members. No word on how many politicians have signed on.
Critics call AshleyMadison a cruel sex site that profits from marital pain. “This is a business built on the back of broken hearts, ruined marriages and damaged families,” says Trish McDermott, a dating-industry consultant who helped found Match.com and Engage.com. “It’s in the business of rebranding infidelity,” she says, “making it not only monetizable, but adding a modicum of normalcy to it. AshleyMadison is making bad choices, broken promises and faithlessness look like something that’s trendy and hip and fun to talk about at a cocktail party.”
“We’re just a platform,” responds Biderman. “No website or 30-second ad is going to convince anyone to cheat,” he says. “People cheat because their lives aren’t working for them.” Not everyone buys that line of defense. The Las Vegas Review-Journal recently refused to run an AshleyMadison ad referencing the Ensign scandal. But other racy TV, billboard and radio ads have succeeded in raising the site’s profile over the past year to the point where by some measures it’s in the top tier of dating sites, with tens of millions of dollars in annual profits. AshleyMadison charges members $49 for a package of credits they can use to contact up to 20 members. Members don’t pay to receive messages, just to initiate contact, so many women end up using the site for free.
Maybe that’s why many of the site’s new members are female. Biderman says the proportion of women on the site has grown from 15% — when the service quietly launched in 2001 — to nearly 30% today.
Dorothy, a 45-year-old Floridian whose screen name begins with SexyMom, says she’s been married for 20 years but started using the site four months ago because her husband constantly turned down sex and refused marriage counseling. “It’s like the seven-year itch, but 20 years later,” she says. “My husband never throws me a compliment. Now I meet guys who say, ‘You’re so hot,’ or ‘You have great eyes.’”
On a recent weekday, 38 men sent messages to Dorothy, who checks these e-mails on her phone during breaks at work. “If I wanted to schedule something for morning, noon and night, I could,” she says. She ignores most inquiries, especially those from immature 20-somethings or older men seeking a one-night stand. “I’m looking for a friend, possibly with benefits,” she says, “but I’m not out there to shake someone’s hand and open my legs.”
So far Dorothy has met seven men through the site, she says, including a wealthy, 49-year-old divorced doctor with whom she hit it off. Dorothy says her husband would be livid if he found out, but he doesn’t know how to use a computer. “Now I don’t have to bug him for intimacy,” she says.
AshleyMadison isn’t the only site aimed at under-the-radar relationships. Sites like EstablishedMen.com and SeekingArrangement.com all offer variations on the theme. But AshleyMadison is the most successful site openly capitalizing on extramarital affairs.
And for that, Biderman offers no apologies. “Humans aren’t meant to be monogamous,” he says. So would this free-thinking CEO mind if his own wife used his site? “I would be devastated,” he says.

WHY MARRIAGE MATTERS
By: Caitlin Flanagan

Around the time of my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I turned to my father at the dinner table one night and said, “It’s amazing, Dad — 50 years, and you never once had an affair. How do you account for that?”
He replied simply, “I can’t drive.”
Watching the governor of South Carolina cry like a little girl because his sexy e-mails got forwarded to his local newspaper, the State, made me wonder whether the real secret to a lasting marriage lies in limiting your means of escape. Whether you’re putting the Buick Regal in reverse or hitting Send on a love note, you’re busting out of your marriage, however temporarily, and soon enough there will be hell to pay.
During the press conference in which he admitted his affair, Mark Sanford warbled that he had broken “God’s law,” a sentiment that served only to emphasize the narcissism that had gotten him in trouble. Wrestling with God’s law had apparently been the subject of many sessions of his Bible-study group, a seminar that may have spent a little too much time on the Song of Solomon, given Sanford’s e-mailed encomium of his lover’s physique: “I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light.” Finally a bit of prose that makes us long for the clinical precision of the Starr report. Sanford told reporters the affair had begun “very innocently,” which reveals that he still hasn’t been honest with himself about the willfulness of his actions. When a married man begins a secret, solicitous correspondence with a beautiful and emotionally needy single woman, he has already begun to cheat on his wife.
Just a week before, another blue-blazered elected official — Senator John Ensign of Nevada — was forced to make a similar confession, although he left God out of it, which must have been a nice break for the Almighty. Ensign had done “the worst thing” in his entire life, he confessed: “I violated the vows of my marriage.” The mood on both occasions was funereal; it might have been touching to see two such buttoned-up guys welling with tears if the corpses weren’t their political careers.
The one thing both men refused to admit was that, back in the heyday of these affairs, they must have been having a blast. These were two middle-aged, conservative Republican men who had said, To hell with being part of the Cialis generation (midlife sexuality depicted as an aging husband and wife reclining in … side-by-side bathtubs? What is the drug maker worried about — that randy Pa might jump in Ma’s bath and break her hip?). Their actions were so willful and blatantly self-centered that the two of them could have credibly fashioned themselves as rebels, possibly even as heroes, if they could have just stopped crying. They weren’t a couple of tools stuck in sexless marriages and making up for it with Internet porn. These guys had embarked on dangerously erotic rampages with real-life, unencumbered women, women who decidedly weren’t … Jenny and Darlene. The long-suffering wives, Fun Busters in Chief.
In the e-mails exchanged between the governor and his girlfriend, they trip over themselves to praise the other’s virtues. She was “special and unique,” “glorious”; he was a man of emotional generosity who “brought happiness and love to my life.” These two humanitarians were engaged not only in worshipping each other’s high-mindedness but also in destroying another woman’s home, hobbling her children emotionally and setting her up for humiliation of a titanic proportion. The squalor and pain that resulted from the Sanford and Ensign midlife crises make manifest a bleak truth that the late writer Leonard Michaels once observed in his journal: “Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another.”
And so two more American families discover a truth as old as marriage: a lasting covenant between a man and a woman can be a vehicle for the nurture and protection of each other, the one reliable shelter in an uncaring world — or it can be a matchless tool for the infliction of suffering on the people you supposedly love above all others, most of all on your children.

In the past 40 years, the face of the American family has changed profoundly. As sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes in a landmark new book called The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, what is significant about contemporary American families, compared with those of other nations, is their combination of “frequent marriage, frequent divorce” and the high number of “short-term co-habiting relationships.” Taken together, these forces “create a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else. There are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country.” An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault. It is buffeted by affairs and ennui, subject to the eternal American hope for greater happiness, for changing the hand you dealt yourself. Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner — this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life, but the numbers who are moving in a different direction continue to rise. Most notably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%.
How much does this matter? More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers’ financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation’s underclass.
The Marriage Gap
The poor and the middle class are very different in the ways they have forsaken marriage. The poor are doing it by uncoupling parenthood from marriage, and the financially secure are doing it by blasting apart their unions if the principals aren’t having fun anymore.
The growing tendency of the poor to have children before marriage — the vast majority of unmarried women having babies are undereducated and have low incomes — is a catastrophic approach to life, as three Presidents in a row have tried to convince them. Bill Clinton’s welfare-to-work program encouraged marriage, George W. Bush spent millions to promote marriage, and Barack Obama has spoken powerfully on the need for men to stay with their children: “We need fathers to step up, to realize that their job does not end at conception; that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one.
The reason for these appeals to lasting unions is simple: on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration — if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.
Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home. “As a feminist, I didn’t want to believe it,” says Maria Kefalas, a sociologist who studies marriage and family issues and co-authored a seminal book on low-income mothers called Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. “Women always tell me, ‘I can be a mother and a father to a child,’ but it’s not true.” Growing up without a father has a deep psychological effect on a child. “The mom may not need that man,” Kefalas says, “but her children still do.”
This turns out to be true across the economic spectrum. The groundbreaking research on the effects of divorce on children from middle- and upper-income households comes from a surprising source: a Princeton sociologist and single mother named Sara McLanahan, who decided to study the fates of these children with the tacit assumption that once you control for income, being part of a single-parent household does not adversely affect kids. The results — which she published in the 1994 book Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps — were surprising. “Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent,” she found, “are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or educational background.”
The consequences for more-affluent kids tend to be far less devastating than for poor ones; they are less likely to become teenage parents and high school dropouts. But children of divorced middle-class parents do less well in school and at college compared with underprivileged kids from two-parent households. “There’s a ‘sleeper effect’ to divorce that we are just beginning to understand,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. It is an effect that pioneering scholars like McLanahan and Judith Wallerstein have devoted their careers to studying, revealing truths that many of us may find uncomfortable. It’s dismissive of the human experience, says Blankenhorn, to suggest that kids don’t suffer, extraordinarily, from divorce: “Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal.”
Put a Ring on It
That prompts the question, Does the father have to actually be married to the mother of his children to have a positive effect on them?
“Not if he behaves exactly like a married man,” says Robert Rector, a senior research fellow of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. If a man is willing to contribute 70% of his income to the child’s upbringing, dedicate himself around the clock to the child’s well-being and create a stable home life — a home life that includes his actually living there with mother and child — he might be able to give his child the boon of fatherhood without having to tie the knot. But that rarely happens. When children are born into a co-habiting, unmarried relationship, says Rector, “they arrive in a family in which the principals haven’t resolved their most basic issues,” including those of sexual fidelity and how to share responsibilities. Let a little stress enter the picture — and what is more stressful than a baby? — and things start to fall apart. The new mother starts to make wife like demands on the man, and without the commitment of marriage, he is soon out the door.
Poignantly, the one thing that unites the poor and the middle class in their hopes for family life is the imperishable dream of being married forever, grabbing hold of the golden ring of lasting partnership. The low-income mothers studied by Kefalas and co-author Kathryn Edin spoke repeatedly of their wish to get married; they “cherish marriage and hold it to an impossibly high standard,” the authors found, but too often forgo it as a result. Meanwhile, the middle class has spent the past 2½ decades — during which the divorce culture became a fact of life — turning weddings into overwrought exercises in consumer spending, as if by just plunking down enough cash for the flower girls’ dresses and tissue-lined envelopes for the RSVP cards, we can somehow improve our chance of going the distance. Think of the touching moments on Inauguration Night, when at ball after ball, crowds of young people swooned at the sight of Barack and Michelle Obama dancing together, artlessly but sincerely and clearly with great affection. They are an immensely appealing couple, and it was a historic night, but what we saw reflected in the faces of those awed young people — and in the country’s insatiable appetite for photographs of the First Family’s private life — was wonder at the sight of a middle-aged man and woman still together, still in love.
We want something like that for ourselves; we recognize that it is something of great worth, but we are increasingly less willing to put in the hard work and personal sacrifice to get there. The Obamas, for example, are enjoying their time of family closeness after almost two years of enforced separation, an interlude that would have caused many less committed couples to turn in their cards and give up. A lasting marriage is the reward, usually, of hard work and self-sacrifice.
The Ballad of Jon and Kate
Last summer, I had an opportunity to find out how meaningful the “in sickness and in health” clause of the marriage vows is when I underwent six rounds of chemotherapy, during which my husband treated me with great kindness. I began strong, making it to the dinner table every night and putting up a brave front for our children. But chemo, she will beat you down. I spent the last week on a friend’s bedroom floor, heavily drugged, mildly nauseated and watching Jon & Kate Plus 8. Ideal viewing conditions, as it turns out. I grew fond of the titular characters, in particular Kate, who seemed to stand like a colossus over their Pennsylvania tract home, constantly corralling and cajoling her uncountable — and, to the layperson, indistinguishable — children into doing relatively simple things, each of which became a hellish exercise in the improbable simply because of the logistics. Sixteen little shoes had to be found and tied before the family could even leave the house. That they weren’t a pack of barefoot shut-ins was a testament to Kate’s indomitable will.
Lying on the floor, drifting in and out of consciousness, I would gaze up at her and feel strangely comforted, the way you do around a certain kind of bossy, sexless power mom. The show approximated family life exactly: it was mostly good-natured and often boring and centered on the most basic transactions of daily existence — getting everybody dressed and fed, cleaning up, keeping quarrels to a simmer, not a boil. Now and then — in moments that genuinely did seem unscripted — Kate would wilt, leaning against the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee and seeming, for the twinkling of an eye, as though she were allowing herself to absorb the shock of it all. But then she would shake it off, plow forward, harass Jon into making himself a lower-calorie lunch and go back to wiping down the counters and giving orders.
Even though it was gimmick-filled reality television, there seemed to be a bit of actual — even profound — truth in it. The underlying premise was that Jon and Kate Gosselin’s marriage was an enterprise dedicated not to making themselves happy but to taking care of the cavalcade of children they had produced, that they were laboring at something more significant than their own pleasure.
I got well, I went home, and I pretty much forgot about Jon and Kate until a few weeks ago, when they catapulted to the forefront of trash culture because they were — according to the tabloids — separated. I assumed it was a rumor, but it turned out to be true. Jon had gotten bored with being bossed around by Kate, he’d had a fling with a 23-year-old teacher, and the couple had filed for divorce. He still loved the kids, he said — with complete guilelessness, as though loving the kids and doing right by them were unrelated events: “I have a new chapter in my life. I’m only 32 years old. I really don’t know what’s going to happen.” And of course, the Gosselins command more attention now that their union is broken than they did when it was intact.
America’s obsession with high-profile marriage flameouts — the Gosselins and the Sanfords and the Edwardses — reflects a collective ambivalence toward the institution: our wish that we could land ourselves in a lasting union, mixed with our feeling of vindication, or even relief, when a standard bearer for the “traditional family” fails to pull it off. This is ultimately self-defeating. It is time instead to come to terms with both our unrealistic expectations for a happy marriage and our equally unrealistic beliefs about the consequences of walking away from the families we build.
The fundamental question we must ask ourselves at the beginning of the century is this: What is the purpose of marriage? Is it — given the game-changing realities of birth control, female equality and the fact that motherhood outside of marriage is no longer stigmatized — simply an institution that has the capacity to increase the pleasure of the adults who enter into it? If so, we might as well hold the wake now: there probably aren’t many people whose idea of 24-hour-a-day good times consists of being yoked to the same romantic partner, through bouts of stomach flu and depression, financial setbacks and emotional upsets, until after many a long decade, one or the other eventually dies in harness.
Or is marriage an institution that still hews to its old intention and function — to raise the next generation, to protect and teach it, to instill in it the habits of conduct and character that will ensure the generation’s own safe passage into adulthood? Think of it this way: the current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can’t be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children’s lives — that’s the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old.
Who is left to ensure that these kids grow up into estimable people once the Mark Sanfords and other marital frauds and casual sadists have jumped ship? The good among us, the ones who are willing to sacrifice the thrill of a love letter for the betterment of their children. “His career is not a concern of mine,” says Jenny Sanford. “He’ll be worrying about that, and I’ll be worrying about my family and the character of my children.” What we teach about the true meaning of marriage will determine a great deal about our fate.