Your Marriage May Be Built to Dissolve

Some people live by a simple rule: if it feels good in the moment, do it. Feel like marrying someone? Marry them. Feel like divorcing them later? Divorce them. There are obvious exceptions where acting on that impulse is the right call, an abusive relationship being the clearest one. But set those aside and you're left with a worldview where feeling is the only compass.

There's a point where a person stops trying to outgrow their narcissistic impulses and starts treating those impulses as the thing to protect. The desires get reframed. Whatever the personality craves gets crowned as the "real" self, the authentic voice worth honoring. Anything that asks for restraint, any moment where libido has to be redirected rather than satisfied, gets treated as a kind of insult to who you really are. Follow that logic far enough and both the individual and the culture around them slide into consumption as a way of life: consuming goods, sex, people, experiences, and even identities.

A vow works differently. The ability to commit to one, any one, is a mark of a grown person. In that sense it functions like a rite of passage. Making and keeping a vow is how an adult signals they've picked up the responsibilities that come with being someone others can depend on, including the responsibility of building a society on the willingness to keep difficult promises and to keep the child's appetites in check. That willingness is what a strong family rests on.

Strip the vow down to its mechanics and it's an act of putting the will above the cravings of the child-mind. You choose your behavior on purpose. You take the raw energy of desire and channel it into a disciplined relationship between yourself and some ideal, and out of that discipline you produce both a self and a society grounded in the strength of human will. When a person can hold their word to a promise that's rooted in virtue, they give the people around them, adults and children alike, the solid ground that trust and vulnerability need in order to grow.

The problem is how casually the vow gets treated now. Too often it's a shiny thing picked up at the store and set down once it stops being fun for the part of us that never grew up. The cost lands on real people: both partners, their children, and generations after them whose lives were built on the shaky ground of someone who decided to try out a vow without the intent or the capacity to keep it.

So there's a choice worth making truthfully. You could rewrite the vow to match what you actually mean, something closer to "a union for now, a parting later." Or you could take the standard version and carry it all the way to its end. In theory either one can be moral and fair. What tends to do the damage is taking up the ordinary vow and then failing to keep it for lack of will, because that failure can leave psychological wreckage in everyone it touches, and the wreckage travels down through the generations.

Maybe the better practice is to make only the promise you mean to keep and are able to keep. When people fail at that again and again, something larger erodes: the shared assumption that a person's word can actually be relied on under any conditions. Once that assumption is gone, the loss shows up everywhere. It touches how you see yourself, your relationships, money, politics, business, and basic ethics, both in private life and across the whole society.

The will is where a vow comes from, and its job is to move a person out of narcissism and toward some virtuous ideal. Take up a vow and keep it. Or change the vow to tell the truth, and then keep that one.

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