love and marriage

Usual up-front warning: my opinions are my own, I don't speak for all Christians, and so on.

I've been surprised by how frequently I hear or read the assumption that love either is or should be synonymous with marriage. And that assumption comes with a second: love can never be a sin. I think both assumptions are mistakes, as judged by a Christian perspective.

To be clear, throughout this message, by "love" I'm referring to the common societal concept of people feeling and/or acting on "romantic" attraction. Its intensity and other qualities vary greatly. According to the conventional interpretation of the Bible, its existence is never an automatic moral justification. Sin is sin, at least for some actions, regardless of the (ig)noble motivation. Quite frankly, people are never permitted to sin whether or not they deeply want to. Or whether or not they can invent persuasive rationalizations.

Again according to the conventional interpretation of the Bible, marriage is the appropriate and correct context for the expression of love. By "marriage" I'm referring to the formal, public, (semi)permanent, exclusive joining of a couple through the exchange of vows and obligations. Readers may object to this singularly unromantic definition of marriage, but that very objection strikes at the crux. Love and marriage are not synonymous!

If the two were, then the Christian laws that restrict romantic love to marriage would be totally unnecessary. It's worth remembering that, in many cultures presently and in history, love isn't a requirement for marriage. Marriages happened for many reasons and were set up by people other than the couple. Culturally, the idea of marriage as purely an outpouring of love is not self-evident.

In a curious sense, marriage is for the sake of everybody else. It establishes that the two people are a unit to be treated differently by society. For instance, they're not available for love with anyone else. They're to be caretakers of each other, each other's property, and of course their resulting children. These purposes are distinct from love but certainly not in conflict with it. This is why informal/private/temporary/open "marriages" are contradictions in term.

Officially unmarried lovers are sinning. Not because the "scrap of paper of missing", but because they're partaking outside of the stringent commitment it's intended for. The contrivance of effective contraception has caused some people to forget how eminently practical this law is. Without it, lovers could produce offspring, then abandon each other. Promiscuity before the era of contraception is messy. Promiscuity before or during the era of contraception is sinful. Marriage is for preventing selfish people from fleeing the grave physical, emotional, and spiritual responsibilities of love.

However! It seems to me that the Christian perspective on love and marriage need not be exactly equivalent to the definition of marriage in a society of plural cultures. Societies that aren't explicitly based upon Christian doctrine, or populated only by Christians, can't be expected to maintain a marriage definition that "works" only for Christians. Put another way, people in subgroups in the society could be "married" without being "married" in the societal records, and people might be "married" by societal procedure without being "married" by the standards and procedures of particular subgroups. Call it "civil marriage" versus "religious marriage".

People united in civil marriage don't require others to pronounce them "married", but they do require others to treat them as married in the ways that civil law prescribes. Their civil marriage doesn't force others to change their minds or beliefs. Free societies will contain couples of all types. Some promiscuous. Some monogamous but eschewing commitment. Some in civil marriages. Some in religious marriages. Some in both. None of them affect the Christian viewpoint which selectively condemns or blesses each relationship.

Christians hate sin. We follow the godly example in doing so. But we don't have the right to outlaw all sin or to harass and hamper the lives of people whose sin is more visible. Through government we have the right to maintain order and peace; the rest is left up to the free choices of each individual to honor God or not.