by Katherine Willis Pershey
Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Va. 224 pages
Lately when I counsel couples preparing for marriage, I give a bleak assessment of the chances their marriage will survive. It’s not that I want them to fail, of course. I want them to know the truth: Over 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. They listen to me respectfully, yet always confident they will be on the brighter side of that statistic. That’s as it should be; why enter marriage otherwise? As if this pre-marriage counsel were not enough, I then tell the couple in the marriage ceremony before God and gathered witnesses that they are entirely clueless about what they are actually getting into. I do all these things in the hope that the couple will enter into their covenant of lifelong love clear-eyed and without illusions. Then I invite everyone to pray. In the future I will encourage them to read together “Very Married.” It’s an honest book without illusions or sentimentality. And even without those common expectations, it’s a chronicle of love that endures. We need stories like this for all the obvious reasons. Many couples either forgo marriage, due to the cynical expectation that it will fail, or get married carrying dark doubts, for the same reason. This book is helpful because it is honest on all levels, including the conviction that marriage is worth sustaining because love is the greatest of all gifts. Very few books on marriage are as strong as this one. “There is no shame in needing covenant to live.”
