“May you love in a time of fire,
May you burn with love’s desire.
May you love when the earth is shaking,
May you hold fast though your heart is breaking.
May these faces reflect your loving,
And may your loving bless us all.”
— Linda Allen, “Wedding Blessing”
A Time of Cultural Upheaval
I came of age in the 1960s and 70s, a time of upheaval and reinvention in the American cultural landscape. Among the many voices, the feminist critics of marriage—writers like Betty Friedan—left a particular mark on me. She argued that the institution of marriage, inherited from antiquity, was by then as ill-fitted to modern life as the human appendix: once useful in digesting rough, fibrous diets, but now mostly a vestigial organ, more likely to flare up as a surgical nuisance than to nourish the body.
From this perspective, marriage appeared less like a sanctuary and more like an outdated relic. And yet, even as these critiques resonated with me, I couldn’t help but notice how, in times of profound crisis, people continued to turn toward marriage—not as a relic, but as a refuge of hope.
Marriage as Defiance
As I’ve grown, married, become a dad myself, and hopefully matured in spirit and intellect, I’ve come to see marriage more as a living example of our deepest desires for union with one another—an act of courage in a fragile world. Each story of a marriage that makes it to the moment of vows is, I’ve come to see, really an act of defiance: a refuge of hope when the world feels utterly broken.
Marriages in the Midst of Crisis
History and the present are filled with couples who, against all odds, chose to marry anyway. A few examples stand out:
Sarah Ann and Benjamin Manson, an enslaved couple who’d held a ceremony on a slaveholder’s porch in 1843, formalized their union decades later. In 1866, they listed nine of their sixteen children on a marriage certificate issued by the Freedmen’s Bureau—an act that symbolized both freedom and family legitimacy.
In Ukraine in 2022, Lesya Ivashchenko and Valeriy Filimonov, both members of the Ukrainian Defense Forces, married at a frontline checkpoint near Kyiv. Amid camouflage and that war’s cruel unpredictability, they exchanged traditional vows and rings, with fellow soldiers holding white roses. Their daughter joined the celebration via Zoom.
In Gaza in 2024, only 61 marriages were officially registered over several months—down from approximately 5,000 in comparable peacetime periods. And yet they continued: acts of defiance, preserving hope when the world felt broken. One such ceremony took place in a tent city in Rafah, decorated with colored lights and simple celebration, a fragile yet radiant affirmation of life amid the ongoing bombardment.
The Common Thread: Courage and Hope
Though separated by time, culture, and circumstance, what unites these couples is a shared conviction: that their vows were not naïve, but profoundly courageous. If you don’t have hope that there will be a world for you and your children and their children, then marriage indeed becomes a pointless exercise. But they did believe. And people just like you and me continue to make the leap of faith that marriage requires, projecting ourselves into a future that is often difficult to comprehend. In doing so, we continue to rethink this institution’s usefulness in ways that Betty Friedan could never have imagined.
Interestingly, modern medicine now suggests the appendix is not useless after all—likely playing a role in maintaining immune strength and gut health. Perhaps marriage is much the same: often dismissed as outdated, yet quietly vital to our resilience as human beings. A fragile thread, yes, but one that helps us endure.