Answer

Why Isn't Love Enough to Define Marriage?

“If two people love each other, why does anything else matter?” is a serious question, and the people asking it are usually not trying to score a point. It deserves a real answer rather than a slogan.

Love describes how two people feel about each other. Marriage is a claim about what they are making together. Love is necessary and it is not sufficient — you can love someone deeply without marrying them, and people do constantly. The Proclamation’s position is that marriage between a man and a woman is a pattern God established, and the case for it does not rest on a single verse.

Eternal Truths

The pattern is rooted in creation. Asked about marriage law, Jesus answered by going back to the beginning, and to male and female (Matthew 19:3–6). He did not appeal to custom.

It runs through five separate witnesses, not one. Rooted in creation. Reiterated throughout scripture from Genesis to the epistles. Repeated by prophets and apostles, continuously and unitedly. Represented in Christ and His Church, whom scripture describes as bridegroom and bride. Reinforced in the temple, where the sealing is performed. Any one of these could be argued with. The pattern is that they all say the same thing.

Bodies are part of it, because the pattern is not abstract. A man and a woman can do together what neither can do alone, and The Family: A Proclamation to the World ties marriage and the creation of life together in the same breath. That is not incidental to the definition. It is where the definition comes from.

What Can Make This Confusing?

What this does not claim matters too. It does not claim that a marriage without children is lesser, that affection between two people of the same sex is not real, or that anyone is outside God’s care. It is a claim about what marriage is. Hearing it as a claim about who is worthy of love is the most common misreading, and it is understandable, because that is often how the argument gets conducted.

Questions to Think About

• Can I state what marriage is for without mentioning who is excluded?
• Which of the five witnesses had I not thought of as part of the case?
• If someone I love is in this, what does staying close actually require of me?

What You Can Do

Learn the five well enough to say them plainly and briefly. Then, if someone you love is in this, spend your effort on the relationship rather than on restating the doctrine — you can hold it without repeating it, and the two are compatible whatever the moment makes it feel like. The essay behind this answer works through all five.

Jesus Christ answered this question by going back to the beginning, and He did it without losing anyone in the room.