As I come to deepen my discernment on marriage with a wonderful woman who I know God has brought into my life, I cannot help but reflect on the beauty of this sacrament and the abuses that the modern world has brought about it.

In the secular world, terms like “other half” truly lose their true meaning. How could we dare call someone we have only certified in a courthouse another half of ourselves? Does this imply some type of unity? While we recognize that natural marriages can or do occur, it is not the slip of paper that unifies and it is certainly not the courthouse that unifies a couple in this way.

No.

We must truly recognize the weight of this phrase “other half”. Someone who builds up with you the beautiful domestic church, in a true union, one flesh! How could we dare call ourselves halves without a true union that makes us ONE, ONE FLESH?! How attainable is the act of such a true and beautiful bond in an act of fornication or sodomy of the same sex? It is not.

Instead of persisting in the mockery of the true sacrament of Holy Matrimony; we should persist to seek to come to the understanding of this union between a man and woman.

How can we do so?

Through the lenses of reflection and tradition; where can we find this?

Look no further than the Holy family.

God left us a perfect example of how to live this beautiful sacrament for us who do not exactly fall into this category. A true standard that stands today in a world full of adultery, polygamy, sodomy, and pornography. He did not leave this standard for the sake of adoration, but for imitation.

St. Joseph, the head of the Holy family does not speak once in the Bible! Does this entail that men should not speak? (not to disparage those who take vows of silence) but we should certainly be mindful of what we say and how we say it.

The reality is that as men, we can often say too much. In even a minor examination of our own lives, even in Catholic spaces, how often our conversations turn unfruitful, all from the root of speaking in empty phrases or wanting to spark a conversation is astonishing. How often have we scandalized other individuals with our “locker-room talk”? Something about our want to communicate and socialize often brings us to less valuable phrases, words, and uncharitable comments. Why?

Men’s alignment to reason. One may ask, why would reason make us come up with such empty or disgusting phrases? Because men’s alignment to reason takes reflection to truly come to fruition. Our Lord Jesus Christ said that we would be judged by every empty word, and that begs the question: How often do we truly align to reason in our speech? How often are our words truly a voice of reason? If we take a deeper dive into our speech, we would more often than not find ourselves silent.

I cannot help but take a tangent into Pope St. Pius X in this regard. I have heard a statement from a traditional priest saying while the saint held the office of the Papacy, he never once smiled and from the looks of the photographs taken of this saint, I believe it (if you don’t believe me go take a quick search around online for a photo of him). Traditional Catholics will often look at the era of Pius X as a great time to be a Catholic, but when the Pope himself limited (or eliminated) his smiling we call to question how much of our time joking and laughing is inappropriate in the society we currently find ourselves in. I truly believe that as men, we should seek at a minimum to lessen our recreation time, not to the point of total joylessness, but always looking to carry the virtue of rationality, reason, and temperance that these saints carried throughout their lives. Lives are ultimately looked at through the lens of serving God.

As a final reflection on men, I find that we as men are often not so clouded in emotion, but when we do, we experience extremes. Particularly anger, we succumb to anger quite quickly, and while sometimes justly so, we must never allow anger to become an excuse for uncharitable or sinful behavior.

On the topic of emotion, we come to the more emotional of the two sexes, women (I say this with a loving poke at my fiancée). We can take a look at this through a negative lens or realize the absolute beauty of this mechanism of God’s creation.

Saintly women can truly show how beautiful the heart of the family can truly be. How wonderful is it to hear about St. Therese having found such a deep and beautiful love of such simple pieces of God’s creation? How great is it to hear about Our Lady, Our Mother, interceding for the first time for the couple at the wedding at Cana? How can we even begin to imagine something so deep as the bond is so deep between Christ and His mother that her soul was pierced? We cannot even dare to imagine the sorrow that she felt as she saw her Son our Lord on that cross.

These women teach us something that we as men often cannot quite comprehend, but women can experience with a much deeper sentiment: truer sorrow, truer joy, and a deep love of neighbor in beautiful empathy.

Does this mean women are the better of the two sexes? Of course not, but this does mean that we have an alignment that is God-given. The two sexes are paradoxically parallel but yet very complimentary to each other. We are meant for each other, and we see this back from the beginning of creation; after all, where did eve come from? The rib of Adam, the side.

So we come to the topic of the end of this union: Children.

How disordered would an environment of pure emotion be to a child? An environment would ultimately succumb to every impulse and an attitude of never saying no. In our atheistic culture, we have come to see this in fruition. But as we are quickly learning, we cannot satisfy the infinite with the finite.

How disordered would it be to have children in an environment of pure rationality minus emotion? What may seem like a pure utopia to the scientism-adhering society of today would quickly deteriorate into a race for efficiency. The cold machine of efficiency for a child would lead to someone quite robotic, quickly expensing the child’s mental and spiritual health for the sake of a learned man in the future.

We need both elements – emotion and rationality.

How then do we attempt to believe that with our alignments, with our obvious cooperative nature that our society could dare replicate this order in something like a same-sex “marriage”? Let’s not seek to live in falsity. Do not suppress what is properly ordered for your sex. We can see these ordered qualities embodied by the saints above, and Christ himself.

For men: How often are we sold false masculinity? Raging angry TV characters vengeance-killing or fighting anyone who dares offend them? We should seek to get rid of the “literally me” pedestal of media and put our God made flesh on the pedestal of our life. This isn’t an excuse to drop a lifting routine or to learn skills such as self-defense or fire arms training, this is a call to imitate Christ as we learn these things.

For women: don’t suppress your femininity. Not in the sense of the objectification spread by media, pornography, and social media, but rather through virtue, modesty, and a truly ordered way of using these deep emotions for the tender love that Our Lady shows (or the destroyer of heresies when justly defending Truth).

True marriage, both in discernment and union builds upon this parallel. A marriage that knows our natures and does not try to run from them or view the other as inferior is how we can see a truly sanctifying another half. As I told my now-fiancée when I first wrote the draft in my journal over 9 months ago, let’s be saints.