As Pope Francis was releasing the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia — his long-awaited response to last year's Synod on the Family — my fiancé and I were taking part in a marriage preparation course at CatholicCare in Melbourne.
'Statistics tell us that one in three of your marriages will end in divorce,' the facilitator said at the beginning of the weekend. 'One in three will stay together unhappily, while only a third of you will have a happy marriage.'
No one goes into a marriage expecting it to fail, but one-in-three odds is intimidating to a cautious gambler such as myself.
Marriage as a life-long loving bond is a beautiful and attractive ideal. But if so many people struggle to realise that ideal, is it time to find a new one? Or do we need a different way to encapsulate that beautiful ideal, one that better reflects the messy reality?
Humanist author Terry Pratchett once wrote that humanity was the place where 'the falling angel meets the rising ape'. Reading Amoris Laetitia, I was struck by the idea that in fact the opposite might be true — that humanity (and a human institution like marriage) is where the rising angel meets the falling ape.
Francis writes with an understanding that marriage is human and messy, but also divine and beautiful. Marital joy, he says, 'involves accepting that marriage is an inevitable mixture of enjoyment and struggles, tensions and repose, pain and relief, satisfactions and longings, annoyances and pleasures, but always on the path of friendship'.
Human beings aren't perfect, and every married person will be able to give you some fine examples of imperfection in their partner. Sometimes those imperfections can be fatal to a relationship.
Marriages can break down as financial or emotional stress takes its toll, as trust is broken through infidelity, or as children grow up and leave couples with nothing else to hold them together. A break-up can often be the only option for people who find themselves in a relationship that has become physically or emotionally abusive.
"Marriage as a life-long loving bond is a beautiful and attractive ideal. But if so many people struggle to realise that ideal, is it time to find a new one?"
But accepting our human failings doesn't mean dismissing the possibility of the divine. If entered into in the spirit of love, marriage can help catch us as we fall, working against those things that might drag us