As a celebrant, I am a fan of the institution of marriage. I’ve been married nearly forty years myself, and I believe that marriage (in all its permutations) and the family unit that evolves from it, are fundamental to our society. But having said that, we all know that some marriages don’t make it for the long haul, for many different reasons.

Marriage has been around for thousands of years in various forms in different societies. Its primary purpose, originally, was to bind women to men in order to ensure the legitimacy of heirs and the continuation of the family and the tribe to which they belonged. The marriage ceremony has been an accepted part of the Christian sacrament since at least the Middle Ages. The traditional wedding vows–– to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part–––have changed very little since the 1500’s. Amazing!

In the Middle Ages the average life expectancy was around thirty years, and this was further reduced during the bouts of plague and other diseases that swept through England and Europe during this time, so when a couple promised to stay together until death us do part, it wasn’t such a big ask––fifteen to twenty years max, if they were lucky! However, in our modern first-world society, we can reasonably expect to live well into our eighties. If all goes well, death may be a very long time away from our wedding day. 

Is it realistic, then, to expect a marriage to last for the rest of our lives? I do believe the shared history, stability and companionship that come with a long marriage are worth the effort involved in forging through the worse, the poorer, the sickness, and whatever else life may throw at us along its way. But I also believe that a marriage that has ended shouldn’t necessarily be seen to be a failure, and that at different stages of one’s life it may be better to move on to another phase, with the opportunity to establish new relationships, while hopefully also accepting that our previous ones form a part of our personal history that we can still value and accept as being appropriate for that period of time.