As young American women and men, it is easy to fantasize about and be consumed with the glamor of the perfect wedding. We are told that your wedding day is the perfect day, all about the bride and groom, and is when you will be the most beautiful of your whole life. This deception is profound and widespread — it is not just an idea among nonbelievers, but one that is swallowed even by God’s faithful.
This idea is dangerous because it is a worldly view of something God has created with true beauty and has made sacred, the unifying of two souls and two lives permanently. The real beauty is not what is visible, but rather it is the love of the couple, the family, friends and community who come to support you and celebrate with you, and the sacred bond of unity and commitment that has been promised and will now be lived out. The real beauty of a wedding is not the ceremony or reception, but what happens after — the lives lived in devotion and commitment to the Lord and to each other.
The effect of our skewed perception of weddings is that we wait to get engaged, to get married and to start our lives together because we feel the need to save thousands of dollars to plan a wedding that only lasts one day. Many wait to get married until after earning their college degrees or to be a certain age, but Christians should take the biblical view that marriage is more important than a career (which changes several times for most people), maturity is what is needed for marriage (not a specific age) and prolonging the engagement period puts many couples’ sexual purity at risk.
I’m not advocating that couples rush into a lifelong commitment before they know each other well enough, before they can make adequate living arrangements for after the wedding, because they’re burning with passion or immediately after high school. But once you’ve decided you love each other and marrying would glorify God in making you partners in ministry, why put it off so long? Just as it is wrong to get married to follow your peers or society’s conventions, it is also wrong to put off doing something that is right.
This obsession with having and preparing for the perfect wedding also distracts from the more important purpose — the marriage of the bride and groom. Getting married is often seen as the end goal, but it is not a finish line to cross or a trophy to flaunt. Marriage is instead the beginning of something more beautiful.
Just as baptism is the first step in an eternal relationship with God — in which you will experience ups and downs that will test your commitment, be faced with temptation and be called to live out love even when you don’t feel like it — so too is marriage. Marriage is to make you happy by sharing your life with someone you deeply love, but also to make you holy in challenging and strengthening your foremost relationship — your original and more important promise and commitment to God.
