Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Catholic Marriage”
Let me begin this article with a confession: I’m deeply uncomfortable with failure. I don’t like it when I mess up, whether on purpose or by accident, and I hate to see other people mess up too. And that’s a problem if I want to see growth in myself and growth in my marriage. It turns out that the process …
There’s a question I’ve been asking husbands for a while now: “Do you feel as cofident and competent at home as a husband and father as you do at work, where you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to get better?” The answer has been an almost 100% ‘no’ rate. The only yes I got was …
In his apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, St. John Paul II exhorts families to “become what you are” (paragraph 17). I’d like to re-echo him. The world doesn’t need your marriage if it’s just like everyone else’s. The world, in other words, doesn’t need you to conform to the world. The world needs the unique culture formed by the coming together of …
I think it’s fair to say that our cultural understanding of hospitality has waned over the past few generations. My mother tells me that in the days of her mother, people would commonly reserve pastries or cake in case of visitors for tea. Bilbo Baggins (admittedly, this would have been back in the Third Age) was able to host a …
There are two basic ways to be joined in friendship with someone else. I can be attracted to the goodness and beauty of the person, or the both of us can be mutually attracted to the goodness and beauty out there in the world. When I am focused on the other person, and they are focused on me, we call …
True friendship is rare; much more often, we have friendships that are merely useful or pleasant. Our marriage should be the rarest kind of friendship, the friendship of man and woman, and when it isn’t, it’s pretty obvious. We need useful friendships– the kinds of relationships that make for good business partners, helpful neighbors, a functioning polity. We need pleasant …
There’s a line in Ephesians 5 that used to trip me up: “He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, because we are members of his body” (28b-30). Echoes of my days studying the humanities at a secular …
It’s my hope that this article serves as a little marital pick-me-up and check-in for you! I’ve been diving into the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, and I’d love to share three attributes of spousal love that he goes over in his wonderful little work, Man and Woman, as well as some things you could do to help rekindle where maybe …
