vows

I was just talking with my sister-in-law Kathy about the fact that we'd both been married some time now: seven years for Catherine and me, eight for Paul and Kathy. Does it seem at all like the marriage is old and stale? Not one bit for either of us. Seven years is the legendary number for marriages going stale, and apparently that's backed up by some fact of our neurological makeup. But I must be neurologically different because I just don't feel it. It seems like we just got back from our honeymoon.

Maybe that's because of my approach toward commitments — and commitment. I was also direly warned about what a "wake-up call" having a kid would be. But I must've already been awake. Certainly it's a commitment; certainly some facts of my daily existence have changed, just as they did with marriage. But it's a joy, not a drag. This puts me in mind of a ringing paragraph by G. K. Chesterton, from his book The Defendant (here's the full text), in which he defends pulp fiction, slang, patriotism, publicity, and other unpopular things, including vows.

‎The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words — 'free-love' — as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.