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Marital Competency

Donal Graeme
July 7, 2016

{Bit of a stream of consciousness post tonight.]

I had an interesting discussion with a friend recently about the difficulty of living a Christian marriage. Our faith, our God, demands a lot from us. I don’t think I am alone in thinking this either…

His disciples said to him, âIf such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.â

(Matthew 19:10)

After discussing the difficulty of living up to marriage, we briefly talked about how few are up to that these days. Which leads me to this post.After giving it thought, it occurs to me that what is going on is as simple as most people these days not being competent enough to marry.

Marriage, successful marriage, that is, requires a lot of life-skills and disciplines. Traits such as patience, strong self-control, charity and kindness all go a long way towards making a marriage succeed. An absence of those traits, and more, makes it more and more likely a marriage will fail (divorce), or will end up miserable for one or both spouses.

It seems to me that, assuming they were quantifiable, one could make a score of each of these core traits. Then you could create an Index of them, to get a rough value for how well someone scores overall. This would lead to a Marital Competency Index, or MCI score, that you could use to measure someone’s marriageability.

Of course, I recognize that a really precise way of measuring the MCI is impossible- quantifying different traits is either impossible or arbitrary. All the same, as an abstract concept I think that it has some worth.

For example, one could use a theoretical MCI score to explain whether or not someone was “marriageable.” By marriageable I mean a score which was high enough to represent that they possessed enough of those essential traits for them to be likely to live a successful marriage. Certain traits, being so essential, would be so heavily weighted that they naturally fall in line with the overall score. Others would have much lesser values, and so might not be “make or break” in terms of meeting the threshold.

Another advantage to this concept is that it helps to understand the role of culture and the surrounding society. This is because the MCI score which represents the threshold for “marriageable” would not be fixed. Rather, it would fluctuate with the culture. A healthy culture that respects and promotes marriage would have a lower threshold. People would be able to marry with less traits and yet still have successful marriages. On the other hand, in a sick culture that actively works to undermine marriage/marriages, such as ours today, the threshold increases. People need to bring more to the table in order to make marriage work these days.

Also, the MCI concept would help explain why someone “turning to Jesus” doesn’t simply make them marriageable. After all, these traits take time to build and develop. Many require years of development. A sudden conversion would not instantaneously cause someone to grow skills that have been stunted for years or decades. To provide a metaphor- a fruit tree that has been sick for a while will not instantly produce good fruit the moment a cure is applied.

[In addition, this highlights how important it is to raise daughters right. They have far less time to correct deficiencies than men, given that their fertility window is far more limited.]

I could probably continue, but at this point I think I’ve covered enough for a single post. Now, I know that I’ve covered this topic in different ways before. But having thought on it, I don’t think I have had a post which is as (hopefully) clear and specific as this one.

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Post Information
Title Marital Competency
Author Donal Graeme
Date July 7, 2016 4:00 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Blog Donal Graeme
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/Donal-Graeme/marital-competency.24891
https://theredarchive.com/blog/24891
Original Link https://donalgraeme.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/marital-competency/
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