Answer

Is Marriage Worth the Risk?

You have watched marriages end. Maybe your parents’ marriage, maybe a friend’s, and the arithmetic looks bad enough that hesitating feels like the sensible response. Anyone who tells you marriage is safe is selling something.

Yes, it is worth it, and yes it is genuinely a risk. Both are true, and the second is not usually admitted. Giving someone your heart means they can damage it. That is not a flaw in the design. A commitment that could not fail would not be a commitment.

Eternal Truths

Marriage is ordained of God, not invented by a culture. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to His plan. Elder D. Todd Christofferson explained why it is not simply one arrangement among many (“Why Marriage, Why Family”).

A covenant is a promise made before you know how it turns out. That is what makes it worth anything. The Lord has always dealt with His people this way, binding Himself to them and asking them to bind themselves to Him (Doctrine and Covenants 82:10). Marriage is significant precisely because it is unguaranteed and you make it anyway.

What you build matters more than who you pick. “What if I choose the wrong person” assumes there is a right person to be missed. Mostly what exists is a person you could build a good marriage with. What to look for is short: someone honest, who keeps commitments, who wants a covenant marriage, and who can repent and forgive.

What Can Make This Confusing?

For thoughtful people the trap is when being careful turns into being afraid. Reasonable caution slides into a screening process nobody passes, and it feels like wisdom the whole way down. If you have dated for years and nobody has been quite right, that pattern is worth looking at as a pattern.

What Research Shows

David Dollahite and Loren Marks studied 28 Latter-day Saint families and the practices that held them together. Belief in eternal marriage was the central theme, and participants tied that perspective to hope, purpose, forgiveness, humility and patience. The study cannot tell you whether to marry. It does show that couples who see marriage as permanent behave differently inside it.

Questions to Think About

• Am I being careful, or am I screening for a certainty that does not exist?
• What would I need to become to be worth marrying?
• Whose marriage taught me what marriage is, and was that a fair sample?

What You Can Do

Write down the qualities you are actually looking for and see how long the list is. If it runs past a page, you are shopping rather than looking. Then pick one of the four short ones above and work on being it. If marriage has not come for you yet, none of this is aimed at you; wanting it and not having it is not a failure of courage. The essay behind this answer takes the question further.

Jesus Christ can make two ordinary people into a marriage neither of them could have managed alone, and He is the reason the risk is a good one.