I’ve spent most of this week thinking about marriage the way I think about most things, mostly in terms of how it feels. Whether it feels close or distant, whether the conversation flowed or didn’t, whether we’re on the same page about the small stuff. All real, worth paying attention to. But none of it is actually what holds a marriage up.

Augustine wrote about this a long time ago, and what struck me is how plain he made it. A marriage is good, he said, for three reasons, and none of them are a feeling. Faithfulness. Children, or the openness to them. And the sacrament itself, the actual bond God has made, whether either of us feels bonded on a given day or not.

That last one is the one I skip over most. I treat the sacrament like something that happened once, at the altar, years ago, rather than something still holding right now, today, whether I’m paying attention to it or not.

So the practical thing today is small. Before anything else, I want to actually thank God for the marriage itself, not for how it’s going this week, just for the fact that it exists and holds, the way a foundation holds a house up without anyone standing there admiring it.

Today’s Bible Study

“Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled,” Hebrews says, plain as that. It’s easy to read “honor” as one more feeling, something you have for your spouse or don’t on a given day. But the verse means something sturdier than that, a value placed on the thing itself, no matter how either person inside it feels in the moment. Honoring a marriage looks a lot like what Augustine was getting at, treating faithfulness, children, and the bond itself as goods worth protecting, not outcomes you hope arrive once the feelings cooperate.

Recommended Reading

If this stuck with you the way it stuck with me, Augustine’s own short treatise, On the Good of Marriage, is worth reading in full. It reads less like a lecture and more like a man working out, in real time, why the thing he’s defending actually matters.