When we talk about the importance of marriage, we’re not just talking about a romantic preference or one lifestyle option among many. We’re really talking about a trajectory decision—the kind of choice that, once made, will shape almost everything else in your life. Imagine navigating a rocket that’s leaving earth for the moon. If you make a two‑degree error when you’re only a mile from your destination on the moon, you’ll still probably land there, just in a slightly different spot. But if you make that same two‑degree error one mile from the earth’s surface, you won’t just miss the landing site—you’ll miss the moon by millions of miles. Some choices have to be made carefully and correctly early, because they determine where you end up later.
Marriage is one of those choices.
When I talk to young people, especially high school students at places like Summit Ministries, I often ask them, “What do you think your biggest decisions will be in the next five years?” Almost always, they start with career, education, or calling: What college should I go to? What job does God want me to have? What’s my mission? Those are important questions, but I argue that they are not the first questions. The first trajectory decision is your worldview: What view of the world is true? If Christianity is true—and I think it is—then we ought to embrace it wholeheartedly, understand it deeply, and let it shape all the other decisions we make. If you get that first trajectory wrong, you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up in the wrong place.
Once your worldview is settled, the second trajectory decision, if you’re someone who intends to marry, is the decision about marriage itself. Strangely, most of us flip the order. We obsess over the career path, the degree, the ministry assignment—and treat marriage as something that “just happens” along the way. But look at the people you know. You’ve seen those who made a great job choice but chose poorly when it came to a spouse, and their lives are a train wreck. You’ve also seen people who made a mediocre career choice but chose well when it came to marriage, and they have rich, stable, fruitful lives. That alone ought to tell us something about which decisions deserve our earliest and most serious focus.
Looking back over my own life, I can see where I didn’t fully understand how important these early decisions really were. I met a girl in 1979, and it was the best thing I ever did, but we were together about nine years before we got married. We weren’t Christians in those early years, and I thought I needed to “get my life together” first. I wanted to get through school, get a master’s degree, get my feet under me financially, and then think about marriage. We struggled in those years anyway; delaying marriage didn’t spare us from struggle. If I could go back and do it again, I would have married her earlier, had kids earlier, and built that life together sooner rather than later.
The more you study it, the more you find that marriage changes us. It tends to make us less selfish, more mature, and more responsible. It pushes us to grow up and “take care of business” in ways that are often rare among people who never marry. H. L. Mencken once said, “A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he’s married.” There’s something about having another person in your life, watching you, giving you feedback, depending on you, that forces you out of your own self‑centered orbit. Married people are more likely to adjust their behavior, take advice, and make choices that are good not just for themselves, but for their marriage and family.
Married people are more likely to adjust their behavior, take advice, and make choices that are good not just for themselves, but for their marriage and family.
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I often tell young people that if you’re going to marry, you shouldn’t treat it as a casual, eventual, background decision. You should treat it as a central calling. Decide early that you are going to prioritize marriage if that’s the path you’re on. Instead of saying, “I’ll secure my job, my degree, my mission—then I’ll squeeze marriage in somewhere,” reverse that. Let your worldview direct your marriage decision, and then let those two shape your mission, your education, and your career. In other words, don’t let marriage be something that just happens to you. Treat it as what it really is: a trajectory decision that can either send you toward everything God intends for you, or quietly set you on a course that leads you somewhere you never planned to go.
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, as that line from When Harry Met Sally puts it, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. From a Christian perspective, that’s not just sentimentality—that’s a recognition that marriage matters more than our culture admits, and that it belongs near the front of the line when we’re mapping out the big decisions that will determine where our lives finally land.
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For more information about how to flourish based on secular research and the ancient wisdom of the bible, please read The Truth in True Crime; What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the Meaning of Life. This book teaches readers 15 rues for life, recognized in murder investigations. It also makes a case for the reliability of the Bible from Biblical anthropology. The book is accompanied by a sixteen-session Truth in True Crime Video Series (and Participant’s Guide) to help individuals or small groups examine the evidence and make the case.
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