Why I Don't Subscribe to the "Stand in Your Marriage" Philosophy

Marriage, Divorce, and Annulment, Oh My!

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The first time I really came to understand the scope of the Catholic teaching on marriage, I was in my early teens. I was riding in the passenger seat of my uncle’s pickup truck, somewhere in rural upstate New York, heading to a destination I can’t remember. We passed by a house on the side of the road and he pointed and said, “That’s John so-and-so’s house.”

And I asked, “Who’s that?”

And he said, “Oh. He was never married to my sister.”

It was an odd way to put it, but I got it, and it framed the issue for me from that point on. It was kind of profound in its way of encapsulating the oddity that annulment represents — and by extension, the marital covenant itself. You don’t get an annulment, you get a declaration that your marriage was always null. There isn’t a breaking of covenant; there is a finding that the covenant never existed at all.

It’s a bit of a mind-breaker. Describing his sister’s ex-husband of many years as the man who was never in fact married to her at all was a remarkably effective way of driving the point home. And his cynicism comported perfectly to the common Catholic trope that annulments are overused or even illegitimate.

Earlier today, I shared some thoughts on Catholic marriage in several interactions with folks online, and I decided to gather them all in one place to offer a more cogent view.

Let’s start with some background.

The Catholic View of Marriage

The Catholic view of marriage is the one I grew up with. I was married in the Catholic Church, and lived under this understanding of marriage even after I stopped practicing. Simply put: a valid marriage is until death, so if you’ve failed or if you’re struggling, you just keep working on it until you stop breathing.

For those reading this who don’t know much about what Catholicism teaches on the indissolubility of marriage, here’s a quick and dirty explainer:

In the eyes of the Catholic Church, marriage is not a contract between two people, but a covenant between two people and God. Catholicism is, to my knowledge, the only Christian tradition that has retained the full weight of the biblical admonition, "What God has joined, let no man divide." (Mt. 19:6; Mk. 10:9)

You can sin against your vows in various ways, but you cannot, in the Catholic view, break your indissoluble commitment to the covenant. The obligations still hold:

“A marriage that is ratum et consummatum [ratified and consummated] can be dissolved by no human power and by no cause, except death.” (Can. 1141)

The reason why Catholicism has an annulment process at all is so it can take hard cases and try to figure out whether the covenant truly existed in the first place. Did the spouses come to the table freely, with requisite understanding of what they were getting into, without psychological or religious impediment, etc.? Did they enter into a truly binding commitment? Did they unreservedly give their consent?

There are a number of so-called “impediments” to a valid marriage, and that turns into a theology discussion too in the weeds for our purposes here. It gets very muddy and complicated as you go down the list, in my opinion. A lot of subjectivity. A lot of trying very imperfectly to figure out what applies to each case and what doesn’t.

Hunting down a defect in consent isn’t exactly a forensic science.

But Catholics go through the annulment process anyway, because they are taught to fear the retribution of God if they abandon a valid marriage covenant — even if their spouse does so first. In my trad days, I used to hear the axiom repeated: “Death before you dishonor your marriage.” If either spouse from a valid Catholic marriage gets divorces and then remarried, it's considered adultery. And adultery, of course, is a mortal sin.

Hell awaits for willful covenant breakers. That’s the perennial Catholic view.

I’ve heard people talk about this belief being used to guilt-trip unhappy spouses into staying. I don’t know that you could call it any more of a guilt trip than any other moral teaching, but I suppose if you don’t really believe in something, it’s going to feel more oppressive to be told there’s a consequence attached to breaking it than if you do.

On the flip side are the people who think you should stay no matter what. I’ll get comments on my posts sometimes with the admonition that I need to “stand in my marriage.” It’s a curiously specific phrase, and I assume this is a talking point that comes out of some kind of Catholic movement that has sprung up in the aftermath of the prevalence of no-fault divorce.

The idea of “standing,” as I understand it, is that you remain committed to your vows even if your spouse isn’t, forever, until they repent and come back or one of you dies.

The people who “stand in their marriage” believe that just because their spouse has lost faith in the permanence of this covenant does not mean that they, too, are absolved of its requirements. In other words: a valid marriage is until the death of one of the spouses, and no one can change that, not even the abandoned spouse.

If you hew literally and absolutely to the Catholic view on marriage, this makes sense. It’s probably your only legitimate moral option, from that standpoint. But I think for a great many people it's also a borderline death sentence; a surefire path to misery, mental and physical health decline, and even premature demise. Along the way, it may very well lead to disenchantment, bitterness, and eventual loss of faith.

Nothing did more damage to my faith than the state of my marriage. No matter how much either of us prayed for each other or the union, no matter how devoutly we tried to live, it never got better. It only got worse.

“Standing” is also particularly cruel because it’s always the abandoned spouse — the one who was willing to stay in the marriage and try to do the work to fix it — who is punished by this path. The spouse who abandons tends to move on without compunction; sometimes they live alone contentedly, but often they often remarry, because they simply don’t feel an obligation not to. I don't see any real virtue in the abandoned spouse quixotically clinging to a marriage that has in all observable ways ceased to exist. Particularly if they don’t even know for certain that it was valid in the first place.

The Annulment Dilemma

All of the preceding is why I believe that in these situations, if a person is concerned about sinning against the marriage covenant, their first recourse should not be to defiantly “stand in the marriage,” but to do the work of finding out if the marriage was ever real at all. Being a martyr for something that might not even exist is a bad hill to die on. And if you’ve gone through decades of a marriage that feels more purgative than sanctifying, you’re entitled to a reasonable suspicion — especially if you believe in sacramental grace is given by God as an aid to the marriage — that maybe you never got the help you prayed for was because the marriage was never valid at all.

Then again, annulments are often costly, time consuming, and incredibly frustrating. They often take years, and are emotionally grueling to everyone involved. I’ve talked to parish priests who have dealt with horrifying administrative incompetence or belligerence from ecclesial tribunals when it came to granting annulments that were justified. Conversely, some have told me about couples in their parishes who are completely unaware that they weren’t validly married by some previous pastor because of a defect in required paperwork. When that happens, the new priest is left to attempt to secretly radically sanize such marriages, hoping not to disturb these folks with the knowledge that their marriage isn’t a true Catholic marriage at all. One priest I talked to said he had a stack of these going back years, long before his tenure at his parish ever began.

You can argue “ecclesia supplet” until you’re blue in the face, but if the Church forces people to go through an arduous and expensive legal process to figure out if some marriages are invalid, but it doesn’t apply that same standard to marriages that clergy screw up and just assumes “God provides” validity for those, there is no trustworthy legal standard to speak of.

It’s bureaucratic and technical and complicated in ways that are deeply corrosive of trust.

We Have Better Neuroscience Now, And it Matters

I want to address another aspect I think is egregiously neglected in conversations along these lines. Not to be a modernist (gasp!) or a deconstructionist, but I think the growing chasm between the Church’s official teaching on the human culpability and our much-improved understanding of human psychology and cognitive neuroscience should not be ignored. The delta is massive. There are still priests out there telling people depression is just selfishness, or that scrupulosity is a sin of pride, when we’ve got overwhelming research showing both relate to involuntary disorders and neither assertion is true.

And to my knowledge, nobody in the Church has been teaching young people who are preparing for marriage about the long term relational effects of attachment wounds, childhood trauma, cultural disparity, or any of the myriad circumstances we’re starting to understand as predictive of long-term relationship success or failure. My wife and I certainly weren’t taught these things. We took some corporate compatibility test with inconclusive results, had a short conversation about our seeming inclination to conflict, and that was about it. Nobody pumped the brakes. Nobody showed us the warning signs.

Entire books are being written today about how these factors play out in marriages. Concerns that should not be ignored when marital permanence is the ideal. Do we no longer believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

To point to just one example, a book I recently purchased in the hope of better understanding what happened is, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love. An excerpt:

Adult attachment designates three main “attachment styles,” or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant. Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness. In addition, people with each of these attachment styles differ in:

• their view of intimacy and togetherness

• the way they deal with conflict

• their attitude toward sex

• their ability to communicate their wishes and needs

• their expectations from their partner and the relationship

All people in our society, whether they have just started dating someone or have been married for forty years, fall into one of these categories, or, more rarely, into a combination of the latter two (anxious and avoidant). Just over 50 percent are secure, around 20 percent are anxious, 25 percent are avoidant, and the remaining 3 to 5 percent fall into the fourth, less common category (combination anxious and avoidant).

Adult attachment research has produced hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of books that carefully delineate the way in which adults behave in close romantic ties. These studies have confirmed, many times over, the existence of these attachment styles in adults in a wide range of countries and cultures.

Understanding attachment styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people’s behavior in any romantic situation. In fact, one of the main messages of this theory is that in romantic situations, we are programmed to act in a predetermined manner.

Levine, Amir; Heller, Rachel. Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find--and Keep-- Love (pp. 8-9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

We’re not all wired the same way. We’re not all compatible. Some of us were made for relationship and seek safety through connection. Others are more compartmentalized and seek safety through control. The latter kind of person tends to be OK alone, indefinitely. The former does not. And for complicated psychological reasons, they tend to wind up together, even though this has disastrous results later on.

(I'll let you guess which one of the two is more likely to initiate an unwanted divorce. )

Over the course of my life, I've personally watched people who “stand in their marriage” (even if we didn’t call it that back then) suffer through being alone, sometimes as single parents, for decades. I’ve seen people convert to Catholicism from Protestantism and not be able to get previous marriages annulled because it’s actually easier for Catholics to get annulments (due to defects in canonical form - see Can. 1108§1) than for Protestants who never believed in Catholic teaching in the first place.

As a lapsed Catholic, I can get away with saying things that practicing Catholics can’t, but I’ll say it anyway:

We need to stop acting like we can just expect God to fix broken marriages, or fill in the gaps on marriages that never should have happened in the first place. I’ve seen and experienced what little fruit this bears, and while miracles may happen, they don’t happen often, or they wouldn’t be miracles.

Instead, we need to take a more human approach, and start actually understanding how human beings actually work, and how the wrong discernment choices going into marriage create probabilistically catastrophic outcomes in many situations.

And then we need to figure out what that means for people afraid that their only choice is between spending the last decades of their lives in miserable loneliness or going to hell for entering a relationship with someone who knows how to love them in a way their previous spouse never did.

The Structural Collapse

We also need to correct outdated views. We can’t honestly believe that a society with decades of no-fault divorce and the broken homes and all the psychological consequences that result from that over generations is even capable of producing many healthy marriages. And yes, I know this point militates against divorce, because of how it hurts children — a point with which I adamantly agree — but I have been forced, kicking and screaming, to accept that I don’t get to do the thing I think is best for my kids. I don’t get to live in a utopia outlined by Catholics who write books and blog posts on this topic. I get to live in the real world, and it stinks on ice.

All the pressure to fix what is wrong in a culture that’s given up on marriage and family can’t simply be on the couple (or the one spouse who doesn’t want the divorce) to maintain while every other thing surrounding them has crumbled to dust.

One of the rare things I found myself agreeing with Pope Francis about was when he said in 2016 that “the great majority of sacramental marriages are null.” Even in a piece I wrote back then that was overtly critical of his message, I conceded that he made a valid point.

Why? Because I knew. I was living it, even then. I was just hoping for a better outcome.

I was hoping for a miracle that never came.

I am living out the punishment for my naivete.

We don't have ANY of the social structures and support systems that helped marriages last in the old days. I see people sometimes talk about how going back to arranged marriages might fix a lot of our problems, which is silly in almost every way except for the fact that cultures where such marriages happened created structures and beliefs that allowed those marriages to “succeed.”

Then again, if the old ways worked so well, how did we wind up with the new ones?

The bottom line is: most married couples these days are totally alone to deal with their problems. They do not have the aid of extended family, they do not have material or childcare support from the Church, many parents are forced to both work to provide for all the “openness to life” the Church encourages, and they often lack the resources to afford professional help if they need it. There are a great many parents of large families who haven’t had a date night in years. They don’t get a break. They don’t get the wisdom of those who have gone before them on how to deal with the struggles that are part of any marriage or parenting scenario. Husbands and wives don’t have elders to turn to when the marriage is struggling to ask for advice. More often than not, the elders are the ones who set the example of broken marriages in the first place.

And all of this happens while we are bombarded, 24/7, with messages that emphasize anti-family and anti-marriage themes, and promote self-empowerment at the expense of personal sacrifice. We are told repeatedly that anyone we deem “toxic” or “limiting to our growth” must be ruthlessly excised like a cancer so we can “become our best selves.”

Oh, and by the way? Even when you can afford professional help, it’s often not helpful. Rachel Sloan, who leads my support group, said one of the reasons she switched from helping women to helping men is that she started seeing how much men are villainized by therapists, by default in marriage counseling — a story I’ve heard from every man I’ve known who has attempted such counseling:

So it’s a big mess, for a lot of reasons.

And no, I don’t know how to dig out from under it. This is civilization-destroying stuff. And for people of faith, or even just those who believe for the sake of their kids that marriage should be forever, it creates a real moral conundrum.

But we’re not going to figure anything out by ignoring everything I’ve mentioned here. We’re not going to save the institution of marriage by lashing ourselves to the masts of our own failed marriages as the ships go down.

If I survive this ordeal, I hope that the wisdom I will have gleaned from it will be able to help others. If not, it’s hard not to wonder what it was even for.

The one thing I know is that I was not meant to go through this life alone. I would have fought for my marriage until I had nothing left, but only if I didn’t have to do it alone. You can’t fix a relationship by yourself. You can’t alter another person’s free will. And if you wait for miracles, you’re more likely than not to go to your grave disappointed.

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