Choosing a Spouse You Can Struggle Toward Heaven With
Not every reason for wanting to marry someone is actually a reason to marry them. That is an uncomfortable thing to hear when a couple is already imagining a wedding day, but it is exactly the caution Fr. Spiridon Skutis raises in a short, direct piece on marriage that deserves real attention before any date is set.
His warning is not about romance in the abstract. It is about specific, common, deeply human reasons people give themselves for saying yes — reasons that feel sufficient in the moment and turn out not to be.
Pity is not love. Marrying someone because you feel sorry for them, because ending things would hurt them too much, because you cannot bear to be the one who disappoints them — this is not the same thing as choosing them. A marriage built on pity asks one spouse to spend a lifetime being someone's rescuer rather than their partner, and it rarely survives the weight of that arrangement once the initial guilt fades and ordinary life sets in.
Loneliness is not a reason either. Fr. Spiridon's counsel here is sobering: marrying simply to escape being alone, or because the years are passing and the pressure to "settle" has become louder than any real conviction, sets a marriage up on a foundation that was never really about the other person at all. Two lonely people do not automatically make each other less lonely by marrying — sometimes they only multiply the loneliness, now shared inside a home instead of outside it.
Wanting children is not the same as wanting a marriage. This is perhaps the most piercing of his warnings, because it sounds so natural on its surface. But a spouse chosen mainly as a means to parenthood is still being chosen for what they can provide, not for who they are — and any children born into that arrangement inherit a marriage that was never fully about their parents' union in the first place.
Desperation is not discernment. When a decision is made because time feels like it is running out, because every other option has closed, because staying single has become the more frightening choice — that is not the same as recognizing, prayerfully and honestly, that this is the person God is calling you to walk beside. Fear can imitate certainty. It is not the same thing.
What, then, is the actual reason to marry someone? Fr. Spiridon's answer is simple to state and hard to live: choose someone you can, in his words, "struggle together toward Heaven" with. Not someone convenient. Not someone who solves a problem. Someone whose own path toward Christ can become genuinely intertwined with yours — someone you can pray beside, repent beside, fail and begin again beside, for the rest of your life.
This is why the Church asks couples to prepare for marriage rather than simply schedule it. Discernment is not a formality to get through before the parts of engagement everyone actually looks forward to. It is the work of asking, honestly and before God, whether this is a person you are choosing or merely a situation you are settling for.
Orthodox marriage does not promise two flawless people joined together. It promises two people bringing their real weaknesses into one shared life, in love, and helping each other grow toward God rather than simply growing older side by side. That is worth getting right from the very beginning — not despite how difficult the question is, but because of it.
Sources and further reading
- Adapted from the teaching of Fr. Spiridon Skutis; read the original (in Macedonian translation by Fr. Jani Mulev) at crkvaveles.mk.
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