Does Happily Ever After Really Exist?

Who doesn’t want to be married happily ever after? I know that I did.

Nobody goes into marriage wanting it to fail — unless the person was only after money or fame or notoriety — but that wasn’t actually a marriage in the first place. That was just a legal contract with some benefits attached to it.

I am talking about the majority of people who get married.

Most people enter into a marriage because they love someone and want to spend the rest of their life with that someone — to begin a new life with them.

They are in it for the right reasons.

So why do 50% of marriages end in divorce? Perhaps an equally important question is why more young couples are choosing to live together than to get married?

What is going on?

The past few years in the Catholic Church we’ve had our fair share of scandals and disappointments with bishops and cardinals and other individuals within the Church.

Honestly, “disappointing” is an understatement.

But let me tell you, none of these scandals have shaken my faith in the Church and her teachings.

Christ’s Church still remains the one bastion left in the world upon which I can place my trust — and I have.

Granted, I’m not naive to the challenges that lay ahead of us in the Church, but there is literally nowhere else that I can go to get the big answers to the big questions of life.

Despite the human frailty, there is no doubt in my mind that the truth of the human person and what will make us happy lies within the Catholic Church — which is why I’m still here.

I’m Catholic because I have nowhere else to go and nobody else to go to who can lead me to the freedom and happiness and answers that Christ alone can offer to me.

It’s simple, really.

I will be forever grateful to the Church for getting me through my teen and early adult years, relatively unscathed. It’s really somewhat miraculous if you examine the culture at the time.

I grew up shortly after the peak of the sexual revolution, and I have to say that many of the kids in my generation had many questions about the choices being pushed on us.

“Grunge music” was all the rage, and it deeply reflected the turmoil of the times.

The decade before, most popular music was singing the praises of getting as much sex outside of marriage as possible — but not so much in my teenage years.

The popular music of my time was singing about the results of sex outside of marriage — even if they didn’t actually know that’s what they were singing about.

They were singing about the darkness, the despair, the lack of peace, the turmoil. What can I say, we were an angsty bunch of teenagers and young adults, and the music was a reflection of that.

At the same time, the Church was putting into writing the things it had always held about sex and marriage.

John Paul II had given his lectures on the Theology of the Body in the 80’s and it was just about to hit the classrooms as professors began to dive deep into it’s depth and meaning.

I just so happened to be going to one of the most amazing universities and it just so happened to be full of some of the best theologians of our decade (I might be biased, but shout out, Franciscan University!).

I just so happened to choose to study Philosophy and Theology and it led me to discover the Theology of the Body at just the right time in my life.

The Theology of the Body was revolutionary in my mind. It was entirely counter – cultural.

There was not a doubt in my mind that it was 100% true.

All of the things I had been observing in my friends relationships and in my own, were suddenly explained in the beautiful, deep, earth-shattering prose of John Paul II.

He was an artist, really, and it was his artistic mind that so clearly conveyed the cause of the angst that so many of us had been experiencing.

He gave us another way — Christ’s way — and it involved sacrifice and digging deep and living a different way from what the world was telling us would make us happy.

So I went for it. I decided to dive deep.

I decided to looked objectively at all the ways the world was telling me to live my life in order to be happy — and I did the exact opposite of it.

I have to say, it was the right call. So grateful for my parents, those teachers and the Holy Spirit showing me that there was another way.

It came at just the right time, and a year after graduating I would meet John filming a chastity video in the French Quarter in New Orleans — isn’t that how everybody meets their future spouse?

Within a year of that, we would be engaged and preparing for marriage.

To this day, John and I still laugh about going through marriage prep with our deacon, who enlightened us as to how different we actually were from each other.

Think complete opposite in almost everything.

Our deacon famously looked at our faces as he reviewed our “scores” for the FOCUS test and said, “Now there is no such thing as failing — having said that, I have never seen lower levels of compatibility amongst any of the couples I’ve prepared for marriage”😂.

Crazy as it sounds, instead of breaking off our engagement, it only made us more resolved to bring Christ into our marriage.

It was clear that if our marriage was going to work, we would have to rely upon the grace of God to fill in the valleys of our differences — and believe me, there were many.

But I have to say, there was one area that we agreed on pretty much everything: our Faith in Christ and His Church — especially when it came to Church teaching on marriage and family, sex and babies. 💯

We had been taught the Theology of the Body, had embraced it as a single man and woman, and were prepared to embrace it, as fully as was possible, in our own lives.

It has made all the difference in our lives.

The world would have told us we were doomed — but that deacon looked at us and told us to seek out the grace of the Sacrament and we were going to be able to work through just about anything.

He was so right.

So if you want to live happily ever after, let Christ be your common ground — let Him be the Rock on which you build your marriage.

Even if you feel like your marriage is a train wreck or awful choices before you were married are hurting you, know you can begin again.

St. Pauls says that, even if you aren’t married to a Christian, God can sanctify the unbelieving spouse through the believing spouse.

Pray, hope and trust in the grace of the Sacrament.

Christ can renew your marriage and breathe new life into it. There is hope for a “happily ever after” for all of us, no matter the past or present we find ourselves in.

If John and I can make it, anybody can. Our faith is what has allowed two highly “incompatible people” to be happily married for the past 20 years.

Everything else is pretty much up for discussion (That’s my nice way of saying we fight a lot about the other stuff. 😂) but our foundation is sure.

As an aside, we also discovered that our differences gave strength to our marriage Often, where I had a weakness, John had a strength and vice verse. Who could have predicted that?!

Contrary to Tom Cruise’s famous line in Jerry McGuire, we don’t “complete” each other — only God can do that — but we do “complement” each other. (JPII called that the “complementarity of the sexes”.)

We do not fear the future, with Christ at our side. We will continue to draw on the grace of the Sacrament.

So hooray for the Catholic Church, helping all of us to continually dust ourselves off and never give up the fight to love each other, serve each other, cherish each other and honor each other — till death do us part. 

Happily ever after does exist, and it exists because of the grace of the Sacrament.

So don’t waste that grace people, there are a lot of people depending on you. With God, all things are possible.

Sharing over at Kelly’s.