God has been removed from the institution of marriage in the West. Marriage has changed from glorying God and becoming one flesh with your spouse to maximizing material rewards and having a “good” life. Because it was God who invented marriage for us, this secular change has not only blasphemed the institution but also deceived all those who wish to get married under the new paradigm. It’s no surprise how difficult it is—if not impossible—to have a successful marriage without placing God at its center.

What are the most common reasons that secular men get married today? One is access to sex. Not every man is a pickup artist who can get dates every weekend. For most men, dating is tedious, and those who are skilled at it have to treat it like a part-time job, often uprooting themselves for the best access to women, but for the average man, having sex with only one attractive girl is enough. He can’t wait to marry to lock in an assured supply of sex, but it will just be a matter of time until that sex gets boring. Many years into the marriage, he may wish to have sex with anyone but his wife, assuming she still wants to have sex with him.

The second reason men get married is to not be alone. No one wants to grow old alone, be sick alone, or die alone, and while this is a fear more common with women, many men have shared with me that this is the reason they are looking for a wife. They will enter marriage not to achieve a positive but to avoid a negative. Their wife selection will be driven by unresolved anxiety, not the virtue of the woman, and just like with sex, you will adapt to the person and no longer see them as your personal savior against loneliness or whatever fear you have. Within a few years of marriage, you will start to limit the amount of time you spend at home and wish you stayed alone, especially if you married the wrong woman.

Another reason to get married is to have children. Now this seems like a great reason, because bringing life into this world must be meaningful, but children are hard to raise with the wrong person, and children don’t remain children for long. Within secular households, pop culture kidnaps them in their teenage years and turns them into little demons of rebellion. They go to universities, where they can perfect all the sex they were exposed to through movies and pornography, especially if they’re female. Otherwise, they become gay, trans, cyborg, or whatever new trend destroys them most effectively. Then they move to a big city far away from home to shower in pleasures of the world. Talk to any boomer parents and they will tell you the “silence” that is their homes. They feel a void that cannot be filled unless grandchildren happen to live close by, which in this rootless society is usually not the case. Much of the joy you receive from your children will have to be given back when the nest is empty or when they pursue lives you don’t approve of.

One final reason to get married, and perhaps the worst, is because you’re “in love,” which in reality is a state of heightened emotional attraction that is closer to lust than love. You are enjoying sex with an attractive girl who excites you and are convinced it will last for all eternity. In this case, you’re blinded by your lust and are totally unable to properly evaluate the woman. Either you commit to a woman of dubious repute or the strong emotions you thought you had changes for the negative, or it changes for her, and then you have no relationship foundation to stand on.

The material reasons I’ve described above will all fail you in time. You will get tired of the woman and her sex, you will feel empty and unappreciated once the children leave the house and no longer need you, and your feelings for the woman you had initial passion for will fade. Many men logically understand this and so have decided against marriage, because with these inevitable downsides, where are the upsides? Why should a man sign on the dotted line to legally declare himself as the provider of another human being who will not excite him or take care of him in the future? Materially, the reasons to get married are sparse, but how about spiritually?

Orthodox Saints have taught that when a man and woman get married, they create a little church with the man as the priest and the woman serving by his side. The purpose of this church will be for them to aid in each other’s salvation, and also aid in the salvation of children who are borne through them (the laity) as one united body that serves the Lord within a bigger united body of the parish church they attend on Sundays. If you’re in communion with God and believe it is His will for you to marry a certain woman, He has deemed that this marriage is necessary for the salvation of you both, and that without this specific marriage, the course of your life or hers will turn out in a way to increase the likelihood of condemnation. There is little material reason to get married in the Christian sense, and because it’s so hard, especially in a post-Christian world, I’ve even read multiple priests state that such a marriage is a form of martyrdom, a way to exceedingly please the Lord.

In a Christian marriage, will it matter that you are bored of sex with the same person? You will know that sex was given to you by God to bond with your wife and create children, not a source of entertainment where you can treat your wife’s body like an amusement park. If you get tired of her, or she attempts to drive you crazy, is that a reason to get upset and divorce her? No, it’s time to pray to God for endurance and tranquility, because you never married her out of a fear that you would grow old and die alone. If your children leave the nest, will you be upset? You’ll miss them surely, but your main concern would be their salvation and whether you gave them a proper spiritual foundation to escape the devil’s many snares. If you lose romantic attraction for your wife, does that mean disaster? You never based your relationship on romantic attraction in the first place. The love you have for your wife will transcend matters of passion or lust that secular people primarily use, and instead become more of a spiritual love.

I agree that getting married in the secular sense is pointless, especially since sex and short-term companionship are being given away by women so readily to those men who want it bad enough. You can even experience a “married-lite” scenario through cohabitation and have a pair of Instagram-ready dogs to satisfy your nurturing instinct, and now with unlimited entertainment options, you’ll always have the warm glows of your digital screens to stave off relationship boredom, but if you do get married for secular reasons and have children, I feel sorry for them. You won’t pray for them or give them moral guidance that is not heavily influenced by today’s state ideologies of individualism, materialism, and homosexuality. Creating life for purely selfish reasons may even make you a murderer of any soul you create, and while I harbor no ill will towards my parents, their secular outlook didn’t do me any favors when I became an adult. The world took me, used me up, and hung me over the edge of the abyss.

If God sends you a specific woman, not marrying her could make you worse off, and only a man actively walking with Christ, who prays daily, has access to spiritual guidance, and possesses discernment of what to look for in a female can know if a specific woman is right for him or not. You don’t need to be experienced with sex or game to know whether a woman is suitable, but you do need to have God in your life. He will help you make the best decision.

I’m not actively looking for a wife, but I do keep my eyes open for a woman with faith, and while I don’t want an “ugly” woman, I know that what I think of a potential wife’s physical attractiveness and how I feel about her is less important than what God makes of our potential union. If God wills it, and she is someone who I believe will deepen my faith instead of obstruct it, I would marry her, in spite of the countless material obstacles and detriments of doing so, because even if that marriage doesn’t work, and I lose my children and all of my money in a divorce, I know that that too is part of God’s will. As long as I don’t seek out a woman for material reasons or to experience pleasures of the flesh, my salvation will be assured.

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