More reflections from Dr. Esolen on marriage: Pseudogamy 105, Pseudogamy 106 and Pseudogamy 107. From the most recent one:

What has happened, though, and what Helias could not really penetrate to the heart of, since it is a new thing in man's history, is that a thriving culture dies and is not replaced by anything at all. What comes to the fore instead is not some other thing that we love as if it were permanent, though it isn't, but another thing that we don't care a rat's tail about because it is essentially transient, and so are we. It isn't just that we move about a lot, though we do. It is that we have come to consider permanence of any sort to be an affront to our beings, to our sovereign "choice". Which means that "culture," such as it is, is demoted to a smorgasbord to meet Mike's taste in Bach and Marty's taste in jazz, with nothing really to unite everyone in acts of general love or worship or celebration. Divorce, as I've written in an old article for Crisis magazine, is the sacrament for this new anti-state of affairs.

I'm not the only one, not by far. Wendell Berry writes about it all the time -- writes about how you can't understand rootedness to a place you love and to the "membership" of people who live there without understanding what marriage is all about. In a sense, easy divorce is a function of the more general and heart-dampening transience. We don't tend the land with care; we treat animals as if they were no more than meat-making machines; we ship our children off to day-asylums and then to school, and when they are not at school we leave them in the care of Hollywood; we don't know our neighbors; and we, surprise, surprise, uphold no-fault divorce. That last is the stake in the community's heart. It is transience in the most intimate relation we know on earth. And we raise our children up for it: witness their "relationships," one after the other, ruin after ruin, or worse, lassitude of soul after lassitude of soul, and then they marry, and we expect them to live as if the vows they make really meant something. Somehow we still know that you can't have a coherent community if people are moving in and out of the apartments around you every nine months. Indeed, in that situation people often don't bother getting to know anyone, since transience breeds carelessness and even a kind of noonday sloth of heart. But divorce, and the expectations that common divorce must breed, infects the community at large with that same transience.