The Young and the Overly Corporatized – Has the Secular World Made Us Less Romantic?

Image: "The Love Song" | Source: The Met Museum

Is marriage simply a legal contract? Could the boiling down of marriage truly be something so unromantic? If that is the case, is it not more romantic to be free and "unencumbered" by the chains of marriage by living in a non-commital way with a partner?

If we understand marriage from a Catholic perspective it is a covenant and not a simple civic contract. It is a giving of your whole person and not a stipulation of “if I do this, you do that and we work it out with a therapist to get all our needs met if we can’t manage it on our own." A covenant has effects more mysterious and unquantifiable than the chore arrangements of a roommate with benefits. It is a giving of whole and complete self - not talents or skills or materials.​

When we think of a relationship as having an opt-out lever, it actually becomes more like a contractual business relationship where you can fire an employee at will or leave an employer at will. An employee with no ownership can't be expected to be as invested in the company as the proprietor. That is why employers have to make so many little rules about coffee breaks and PTO to have temporary unity and achieve goals.

But with marriage, you really don’t have a business arrangement. It is a spiritual and physical giving of your whole self that can’t be quantified. A giving of one's whole self in marriage without reserve - radical! But that is what makes it romantic. Especially when the people in the covenant have recourse to God. When people allow themselves to be loved by God they become more unreservedly loving and giving.

Without God, we actually become very legalistic. The Church has gotten a bad rap for its rules and regulations, but rules are not necessary with love, as love fulfills the law. And the Church is the body of Christ, who is Love. Catholics ideally cling to the Church and experience Jesus through Holy Communion to build up the indwelling of God. The Church offers graces to live a holy life through sacraments. And that is why the Church requires Catholics to be married in the Church. It is one of the sacraments and has divine graces for the marriage.

In an attempt to throw off sanctified covenants by the authority of God, people become more invested in the tangible and physical benefits of marriage and, as a result, become less romantic. They are wary about throwing caution to the wind (be careful! - that sort of thing could result in the permanence of marriage!) because a world without God can't afford that. There is already too much to worry about.  

As much as people can say that marriage is a business contract, a thing of the past for peasant farm laborers with no options, it seems to still be the case in long-term, convenient, good-enough, non-committal relationships. Today's modern relationships of convenience look unbusinesslike and might consist of low-effort binging TV and ordering take-out, but perhaps are actually more businesslike in their ethos than marriage as these "partners" trade on their couch companionship, listening, health insurance, and chore-work for an indefinite amount of time. If the partners are no longer satisfied with each other's "service", perhaps it will be time to do business elsewhere...

All the things that the world worries about have become what Catholics worry about too now: retirement benefits, health insurance, making sure a chore system is fair, calculating an affordable number of children, and general quantifying of existence. In some ways, this preoccupation has dethroned God. But if you live as if God isn't real, this is the all-consuming reality – the variables of life are odds against you. There really is a reason to live in the slavery of fear.

But with God all things are possible. And that is the mysterious romance of love and faith.