Why DO Women Get Married?

This is in follow-up to this article, which states that a stay-at-home mother earns a yearly salary of a little less than $140,000.

In 2001, when my oldest child was just 11 years old, I was hit with a very scary thought: someday, most of my children will marry. This came to me while I was considering a job in a city. The job, by the way, was professionally my dream come true. I would realize all my professional goals in a practice that covered all the surgical specialties that I wanted to practice with. I couldn’t ask for a better position. We all went to the city to have a look around.

During the weekend, there was still this nagging thought which started out as just a whisper, but by the end of the weekend had grown to the level of a thunderclap in my mind. My children will one day reach the age where their vocation will require them to start looking around for a potential mate. As their father, trying to look at the city through the eyes of young men and women, I was not impressed with the likelihood of finding a potential mate for my children. For this reason, as well as for other reasons, I took a job elsewhere.

Throughout the whole weekend, Wifeofdadwithnoisykids kept her opinion to herself, even cheerfully looking at houses while silently praying that I would not take the job. I would say she earned the $140,000 in just that weekend.

Now jump forward to 2007, immediately after I met one of the oddest couples I have ever seen. What made the couple so strange was that the man did not seem to have any redeeming quality that would make him attractive. Granted, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in this case something just didn’t make sense. As a father of four girls, I wondered what I would do if one of my precious little girls showed up with a guy like this, saying ‘Daddy, meet Arlo, the man of my dreams!’

I was wondering aloud ‘Why DO women get married,’ and got a rather depressing answer from some of my woman colleagues. “Loneliness makes one do imprudent things,” was the general response from a couple of women. That was sad to hear. It reminded me of a previous post, a quote from St. Anthony of Padua, which states that one must be deeply in love with God before looking to love another:

“Discovering that only in me is your satisfaction to be found, Will you be capable of the perfect human relationship that I have planned for you. You will never be united to another until you are united with me.”

We try to instill this in our children. We want them to know the love of God is far more precious than the love of a man or woman. We want them to know that the single life or the religious life is not a self-imposed exile into solitude. For those called to the married life, we want them to set their standards high when choosing a mate. If they see the Mary and Joseph as their ideal married couple, they will look for potential mates who demonstrate the same desirable virtues. For our part, my wife and I will hopefully never have to see our children marry someone whom we know will be nothing but trouble – or join a religious order which is not faithful to the Pope and the Magesterium.

So then why do women get married? Certainly not for the money. Some women married out of loneliness, as mentioned above. The woman in this old blog posting married with the expectation of living a glamorous life as a doctor’s wife.

Hopefully women(and men) marry after falling in love with God, giving themselves entirely to Him. Marriage becomes an addition to their love for God, and is a source of drawing the spouse, children, friends, and anyone else closer to God. For those blessed with such a woman as their wife - and I consider myself one blessed with such a woman - there is no amount of money that could pay for having such a stay-at-home Mom.