Revisit your marriage based on the vows you made on your wedding day. Warning: It could transform your understanding of marriage and strengthen your marriage in amazing ways!

Let’s start by considering the wedding vow itself. A minister usually asks the groom some variation of the following question:

“Will you take this woman to be your wife, to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in joy and sorrow, in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her so long as you both shall live?”

If the groom makes this promise, the minister asks the same question of the bride: “Will you take this man to be your husband, to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in joy and in sorrow, in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him so long as you both shall live?”

When the bride agrees, the minister announces that, based on the promises the couple have made to each other, he can pronounce them husband and wife. So it’s reasonable to assume that these vows describe what it means to be married in the traditional sense. A closer look reveals qualities that may be expressed in the following definition:

Traditional marriage is a permanent (as long as you both shall live) and sexually exclusive (forsaking all others) relationship of extraordinary care (love, comfort, honor, and keep, etc.) between a man (to be your husband) and a woman (to be your wife).

Part 1: Extraordinary Care

In their wedding vows a couple promise to “love, comfort, honor, and keep” each other in any of life’s circumstances: “in joy and in sorrow, in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health.” Couples making this promise don’t intend to care for each other only when times are good. They promise to care for each other when times are bad as well. And if, at the time of the wedding, one of them refused to make that promise, few would be willing to go through with the ceremony.

Part 2: Sexual Exclusivity

When a couple marry, they promise to “forsake all others” and be “faithful” to each other—sexually. Faithfulness in marriage is so fundamental to the marriage agreement that when the vow is broken, most marriages go into a freefall. Infidelity ranks as one of the most painful experiences of a betrayed spouse’s life. Anyone who knew at the time of their wedding that their spouse would eventually have an affair would refuse to marry that person. It’s that important to remain faithful.

But affairs do not harm just marriages—they also harm children. A child also feels betrayed by a parent who cheats and then lies about it. Can you think of a worse example to a developing child than an unfaithful father or mother?

Part 3: Permanence

A couple who marry promise to remain together “as long as we both shall live,” and that promise is essential to marriage for a host of reasons. The most important reason is that stability and continuity are required for raising children successfully. If a couple were told on the day of their wedding that they would divorce when their children were young and needed them the most, they would stop the ceremony. Even if a couple knew they could only avoid divorce until their children became adults, I’m not sure they would agree to be married. That’s because marriage creates interdependence—both spouses come to need each other in order to thrive. A divorce at any stage of life rips them apart, damaging both of them.

The relentless attack on traditional marriage that began in the 1930s started to affect the divorce rate in the 1960s and ‘70s. The cultural emphasis on self-centeredness during those decades caused couples to file for divorce in unprecedented numbers. But instead of passing laws to encourage couples to care for each other and restore their marriage, laws were passed making divorce easier than it had ever been. An unhappy spouse no longer needed a reason to break a commitment that had profound implications to children and to society. Instead it could be broken without justification. (from, pages 14-17, “Defending Traditional Marriage,” by Willard F. Harley, Jr.)