Essay

What Marriage Is For

You may wonder, “Why does the Church still teach that marriage is between a man and a woman?” “If two people love each other, why does gender matter?” And what if you believe what God has taught about marriage, but your own life does not seem to be moving toward it? Maybe you are still single, experience same-sex attraction, have been divorced, cannot have children, or have seen enough painful marriages that you are not sure marriage sounds hopeful at all.

Those are important questions, so let’s dive into the starting point: understanding what God says marriage is for.

Marriage joins a man and a woman in a covenant relationship, provides God’s setting for creating and raising children, and connects generations from both the mother and father into families.

Jesus Pointed Marriage Back to the Creation

When religious leaders questioned Jesus about marriage and divorce, He did something significant. Instead of beginning with the customs of His day, He went all the way back to the Creation.

He said, “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4).

Then He continued, “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh” (Matthew 19:5).

Jesus was teaching that marriage did not begin simply as a social custom. He connected it to God’s creation of humanity as male and female, patterned after our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. A man and a woman are physically and emotionally different, in marriage those differences are brought together in a union that neither can create alone. Because of sexual complementarity, their union has the potential to create a new human life and begin another generation:

Marriage Is Connected to Why We Came to Earth

The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that before you were born, you lived as a spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents. You accepted Heavenly Father’s plan to come to earth, receive a physical body, gain experience, and progress toward your eternal destiny.

Then the Proclamation connects that plan directly to marriage and family. It declares that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”

That helps explain why God cares about the particular relationship of a husband and wife. Every person who comes to mortality needs a body. God has appointed the union of man and woman with the capacity to create mortal life, and He has given fathers and mothers sacred responsibilities toward the children who come through that union.

But What If My Life Doesn’t Look Like That … Yet?

This is where the doctrine needs to be taught carefully.

Teaching God’s pattern does not mean pretending that every faithful person currently has that pattern in his or her life. The Family Proclamation itself acknowledges that “disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.”

Some people deeply desire marriage and have not found the opportunity. Some experience same-sex attraction while sincerely trying to live their covenants. Some have gone through divorce or the death of a spouse. Some live with physical or emotional challenges that make dating or marriage unusually difficult. Some want children and cannot have them. Others carry fear because the marriages they saw growing up were painful or unsafe.

Those circumstances are real. They can hurt deeply. But they do not change God’s doctrine, and they do not remove anyone from His plan.

Your marital status is not a measurement of your worth before God or of how faithfully you are progressing toward Him. The Church’s young adult article “Marriage Prepares Us for Eternity—How Can We Do That While Single?” teaches that the doctrine of eternal marriage can shape how you prepare for exaltation even before marriage comes.

You can make and keep covenants, build Christlike relationships, serve children and families, strengthen your ward, honor the law of chastity, worship in the temple, and become more like Jesus Christ right now.

Marriage matters eternally. So does the discipleship you are living today.

You Can Believe the Doctrine Even Though Life Is Challenging

Sometimes it can feel as though there are only two choices. Either you affirm God’s teaching about marriage and minimize the pain of people whose circumstances are different, or you take that pain seriously and begin wondering whether the doctrine itself should change.

The gospel gives you the best way.

You can believe what God has revealed about marriage while listening carefully to someone whose experience is painful. You can uphold the Proclamation’s teaching about fathers and mothers while loving a single parent who is carrying enormous responsibility with faith. You can believe in eternal marriage while mourning with someone after a divorce. You can believe God’s commandments concerning sexuality while being a loyal, compassionate friend to someone who experiences same-sex attraction.

His Atonement is the reason we can hold both together. God can establish an eternal pattern while also providing mercy, strength, healing, and eventual compensation when mortality prevents someone from receiving every blessing now.

”We Are All Ready to March”

Elder Christofferson spoke directly to people carrying difficult circumstances connected with marriage and family:

“And when you who bear the heaviest burdens of mortality stand up in defense of God’s plan to exalt His children, we are all ready to march.”

What Does Research Tell Us About Family Stability?

Research using 3,676 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study examined family structure, family stability, and children’s cognitive, behavioral, and health outcomes. The researchers found meaningful associations marital structure is associated with children’s most positive outcomes.

These findings also note that children can flourish in difficult circumstances, especially when they are surrounded by loving and committed adults.

Dr. Ryan Anderson also explains:

Why is marriage between a man and a woman? Part of the reason is simply the way God created us to be physically and emotionally complementary. Men and women are different, and those differences matter. A child comes into the world through the union of a man and a woman, and children then depend on adults to love, protect, teach, and care for them as they grow.

This understanding of marriage has changed in recent decades. Changing the definition of marriage also changes the way we think about what marriage is for.

This is why the differences between men and women matter to the Christian understanding of marriage. Husband and wife are not simply two interchangeable adults. They bring different gifts and relationships to the family, and together they create the only kind of union through which a child can be conceived naturally.

—Ryan T. Anderson, “Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It.”

A Few Things to Think About

When you hear marriage described mainly as a relationship for adult companionship or happiness, what parts of God’s larger purpose for marriage and family might be missing?

How does Jesus’s teaching about “male and female” at the Creation in Matthew 19:4–6 help you understand why marriage between a man and a woman matters in God’s plan?

If your own family circumstances are different from the pattern described in the Family Proclamation, have you begun interpreting that difference as evidence that you do not belong in God’s plan?

Is someone you know carrying a difficult circumstance connected with marriage, same-sex attraction, infertility, divorce, widowhood, or singleness? How could you support that person while continuing to trust what God has revealed?

What part of your future are you being asked to trust Jesus Christ with because you cannot presently see how it will work out?

What Can You Do This Week?

Read Matthew 19:4–6 and then read the sections on marriage, parenthood, and family in The Family: A Proclamation to the World.

If marriage feels distant, painful, or uncertain for you, do not put your spiritual life on hold. Keep the covenants you have already made. Worship in the temple when you can. Build healthy relationships. Strengthen children and families around you. Become the kind of disciple who knows how to love, sacrifice, forgive, serve, and keep promises.