While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

We have been exploring marriage as a means to help one another become the glorious, unique persons God is making us. Marriage partners can say, “I see what you are becoming and what you will be (even though, frankly, you aren’t there yet). The flashes of your future attract me.

Ultimately, your marriage partner should be part of what could be called your “mythos.” C. S. Lewis spoke of a “secret thread” that unites every person’s favorite books, music, places, or pastimes. Certain things trigger an “inconsolable longing” that gets you in touch with the Joy that is God.

Whatever God's reasons for such diversity, creativity, and sophistication in the universe, on earth, and in our own bodies, the point of it all is His glory. God's art speaks of Himself, reflecting who He is and what He is like.

According to the Bible, God devised marriage to reflect his saving love for us in Christ, to refine our character, to create stable human community for the birth and nurture of children, and to accomplish all this by bringing the complementary sexes into an enduring whole-life union.

Marriage used to be a public institution for the common good, and now it is a private arrangement for the satisfaction of the individuals.

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is... learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

In this view of marriage, each person says to the other, "I see all your flaws, imperfections, weaknesses, dependencies. But underneath them all I see growing the person God wants you to be." This is radically different from the search for "compatibility.

We think of a prospective spouse as primarily a lover (or a provider), and if he or she can be a nice friend on top of that, well isn't that nice! We should be going at it the other way around. Screen first for friendship. Look for someone who understands you better than you do yourself, who makes you a better person just by being around them. And then explore whether that friendship could become a romance and a marriage.