Marriage is a great institution.

But who wants to be in an institution?

I see a lot of jewelry ads this time of year where guys are giving big diamond engagement rings to girls in Christmas settings. I actually know a couple that got engaged on a carriage ride at Christmas. You'd think Christmas was by nature a romantic time of year, but it really isn't -- the Holy Family modeled perfect love, but not romance. However, folk songs (yick) demonstrate that Christmas has long had a "true love gave to me" feel to it, so I suppose there's something to it. 

Then again, people get a lot of cars in Christmas commercials too, and I've never gotten one. 

But we must assume that many people in relationships are considering popping the big one this time of year, so we ought to add a word of advice here, dusted off from my old defunct blog:

As that profound religious thinker, The Impressive Clergyman, once said, “Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togedder tooday. Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wiffin a dweam. And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva. So tweasure your wuv.”

It’s a sad fact that there is a lot of divorce about today. Then again, maybe some people don’t think of it as a sad fact. Maybe they think in olden times when few people were divorced that most people were stuck with other miserable people, but now everyone can be free to dump the other person and they can each go and try again elsewhere, and that it’s a good thing all around. Hooray!

But divorce is not exactly a new thing. As far back as 1947, in the novel Full Moon, P.G. Wodehouse describes his young American millionaire, Tipton Plimsoll, as "The son of parents who after marrying each other had almost immediately started marrying other people with a perseverance worthy of a better cause," and that "his had been one of those childhoods where the faintly bewildered offspring finds himself passed from hand to hand like a medicine ball." Back then the American wealthy were known for divorcing---see also 1939’s The Women by Clare Boothe Luce---while the peons, aware that their reputation as well as their financial security was at stake, stayed together. Now it’s the other way around, ironically.

I am a strong believer in the institution of marriage. Of course, mine is intact because I married a saint. Still, for at least one of us, there was a steep learning curve when we first got married. Maybe more like a learning wall. Sorry, honey. Anyway, marriage is the building block of society; people running around permanently unattached do not make a society, they make anarchy. Two problems with anarchy: It’s only fun until it actually happens; it may be the shortest-lived of any kind of society, because some tyrant will come along and impose order with the promise of security. Only the strong like anarchy because they intend to do away with it.

Divorce is nothing short of disaster to the one who still wants to stay in the marriage while the other does not. A number of my friends have gone through that and my heart goes out to them. I’ve also known folks who said their marriage had fallen or was falling apart, but I think that's a misnomer. Barring tragic circumstances, marriages do not just fall apart. Someone is dismantling them. Or they never existed in the first place.

That’s why we Catholics insist on Pre-Cana, the preparation for marriage. No one ever knows entirely what they’re getting in for with marriage, but you had better have some awareness and be warned to build that house out of bricks. Even lapsed Catholics have a lower rate of divorce than the norm, but they have a considerably higher rate of divorce than those who attend Mass faithfully. And no matter whether divorce is a needful or frivolous thing, there's nothing happy about it.

So don't go popping the question because Zales or Kay make it look like fun. Go into marriage with your eyes open and your TV off, kid. 

And remember, always tweasure your wuv. Wuv, after all, makes the world go ’wound.