I recently came across this excellent quote on marriage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German preacher who was executed by the Nazis for trying to overthrow Hitler. Coming from a serious man, who lived in a day of serious challenges, it is all the more poignant and worthwhile.
Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance…
In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more that something personal — it is a status, an office … that joins you together in the sight of God and man…
It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love. God makes your marriage indissoluble. “What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). God joins you together in marriage; it is His act, not yours…
Free from all anxiety that is always a characteristic of love, you can now say to each other with complete and confident assurance: “We can never lose each other now; by the will of God we belong to each other til death.”