A wedding, A marriage

A pebble when held close to your eye looks like a boulder. Its a very simple concept, little things if they are really close to you can seem very, very large.

In the marriage debate, there are many items which look huge because they are close to how we understand the social climate of today. But they are really pebbles in the much larger perspective of what marriage is and has done through millenia for cultures.

Weddings, for all of their wonderful celebration of marriage, are a good example of one of these pebbles. A wedding day is large as life to the married couple as they plan to get married. The day comes, and goes. It casts a large shadow on the first few years of their marriage. But as time goes on the defining moments of the marriage become those times that the two people reconcile their differences and renew their marriage promises. Those times where hardships work to drive the spouses apart, yet they cling to each other and learn to work as one. Those times where children's needs exacted great sacrifices from both spouses.



But not always will opposition define a marriage. Each family develops culture over time. Its not the one-time marriage which fills the photo books as much as the regular passing of each birthday, Christmas and other holidays. The rituals that seem to dictate how we celebrate events from our past traditions.

Each passing year melts into a large stream, who's head is your marriage and the marriage of your parents. All the gifts of instinct, reaction, as well as the virtues are passed from one generation to the next. And with each passing the virtues are either refined and made more bright or they are left to diminish over time.

A wedding is one of the few times we celebrate an accomplishment before it happens. We celebrate a graduation after the work of study and testing is past. We celebrate a retirement after the long work of career development has past. But a wedding celebrates a marriage before all the real work and testing and development has happened. For this reason, you might find people who treat the wedding as the accomplishment. You might find people who are ready to take the winnings of the wedding and forgo what marriage is. You might find that any two people who qualify for a wedding ceremony are a marriage.

But what your marriage is doesn't die like the school days, or the career days. It lives on in your children. You've either given them a great stepping stone to develop their identity or a great hurdle to overcome (which many children turning into adults falter and fall because of the burden). You've either helped them understand who they are, because you know who you are, or you've left them to reconcile who they are in spite of their parents example.

There is much work to be done for people who have not been born under the protection and guidance of marriage. Anyone who is willing to help may. However, what marriage is has to be the prime consideration of any policy to help limit the damage happening in the first place. Only a real ideal of marriage can do that one important task of keeping families intact and thriving as living cultural entities.