Friendship Before Sex: A New Plan for Finding Love

By Sara Goff “Young love is a flame; very pretty, very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.  The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deepburning, unquenchable.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher (from RQ Relationship Intelligence by Richard A. Panzer) In my late twenties, I found myself in a two-year […]

Thirty Years In: A Reflection on “Soul Mates”

By Jennifer Grant A friend posts a status update, tagging his wife, on Facebook:          A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance, and tenacity. The order varies in any given year. Thanks for 20 YEARS of all the above, my dearest! I think long-married people are less likely […]

Great Expectations — The Real Key to Happily Ever After

By Lisa Wilkes Took the plunge. Ball and chain. Found my soul mate. Happily ever after. You complete me. If you Google euphemisms for marriage, these are some of the phrases that will pop up. With today’s divorce rate nearing 50%, a lasting and fulfilling marriage is often the exception, however, not the rule. So […]

Save Your Marriage — Don’t Even THINK About Divorce!

By Suzanne Venker What’s your attitude toward marriage as an institution? Is it more traditional in nature, or does it match the culture’s more progressive, cavalier view? Your attitude is the single most important determiner of your success in life. Life will throw you a thousand curve balls. So will marriage. But it isn’t the curve balls […]

In Praise of the Tenacity of Marriage

By Jennifer Grant At the small, religious college I attended, some girls joked that they were there to earn a “Mrs.” degree. I steered clear of them; their preoccupation with finding husbands seemed not only ridiculous but also pathetic to me. And I had plans. After college, I’d go to grad school, write a novel, […]

The Joy of Love

By Dr. Hilary Towers Last week Pope Francis released his eagerly-awaited synthesis of the work that took place during the 2014 and 2015 synods on marriage and the family. The conclusions reached by Francis and the synod fathers in the lengthy document entitled, Amoris Laetitia, (Latin for “The Joy of Love”), have caused much discussion […]

Daughters of Divorce

By Aimee Lynch As college-age women find their seats, I consider their faces. Outwardly, we look different. We come from different years in school, and have different majors and varying personalities. All strangers until we began sharing stories about our common bond:  we are all daughters of divorce. As a child of divorce myself, and […]

Giving Hope to a Relationship Third-World Country

By Sage Erickson Picture a third world country: desperate poverty, a daily struggle to survive, widespread suffering, minimal sanitation, and diminished economic opportunities. Now picture the United States. Although the United States has long been known as a first-world country politically and economically, has it become a third world country when it comes to romantic […]

Marry First

By Julie Baumgardner Remember the rhyme, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage”? Not so anymore. Over the past decade there has been a shift in the sequence of marriage and having babies. New research indicates 57 percent of mothers between the age of 26 and 31 are unmarried when […]

Marriage In The Culture of Immediacy

Written by John Stewart Our culture’s obsession with immediacy (I feel ignored if my email is not answered within an hour), simple answers to complex problems (kill all of the radical Muslims, this will teach them not to hate us) and impermanency (I long for the new IPhone before I have learned to use the […]