What is Intentional Marriage?

An intentional marriage is one where the partners are conscious, deliberate, and planful about maintaining and building a sense of connection over the years. My emphasis here is on rituals, but a lot else goes into being intentional about marriage: attending marriage education experiences, building a community of support for one’s marriage, setting boundaries with children. In some ways ours is a movement to promote being intentional about marriage, to promote mindful marriage. Because in this era, if we are not intentional, we will become an automatic pilot couple. What I mean is that the natural flow of marriage relationships in contemporary life, with our crammed schedules, endless tasks, kids to care for, and ever-present television and other media is towards less focus on the couple relationship over time, and therefore towards less connection, less spark, and less intimacy. This is not being dysfunctional, this is being normal.
I work in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is right near the Mississippi, the farthest north where big ships can navigate the river. I like to use Mississippi analogies when I talk to couples. Getting married, I say, is like getting into a canoe in the Mississippi River at St. Paul. If you don’t paddle you go south. Not that I have anything against the south, but if you don’t want to go there, you’ve got a problem. If you want to stay at St. Paul ? it’s a pretty powerful river ? you’ve got to paddle. And if you want to go north you have to have a plan. To grow closer over the years, you have to be mindful and intentional not only because of the pace and distractions of life, but also because of what research has shown is the loss of intensity that occurs from daily living over many months and years, from sleeping beside the same person every night and having sex 3.25 times a week in the first five years and then 2.5 in the next five years. (I never knew what those decimals meant in the studies. False starts, perhaps?)
Let’s see, where was I? I was saying that going on automatic pilot is not about being dysfunctional; it’s about focusing on other things. That’s even before we have kids. But after we have children, the current gets really swift. With new babies, our first priority is naturally the care of a creature that nature has programmed to get our attention. And our second priority is self-care. We tradeoff child care so that we can get some individual down time. We end up borrowing on our marriages, not just for a short time but for a long time. We borrow on each other’s good will and time and energy in order to do our job as parent and in order to have down time for self-care. We evolve good parent-child rituals, but we lose our marital rituals. People can be quite gifted at family rituals with the whole family, and quite dumbfounded about what they would do as a couple. Couples who courted through having long, romantic dinners are sometimes nervous about dining alone because they are not sure what they would say to for an hour or more. So they make sure they invite other people along for company.
And so, our marriages go on automatic pilot. During courtship the marriage is figural in our lives—front and center, if you will—and the rest of our lives are ground. When we get married, and particularly after we have children, this reverses: other things—the children, our work, our hobbies, our religious involvement—become figural and the marriage moves to the background and only gets our attention when there’s something wrong. The antidote to becoming an automatic pilot couple, I am saying, is to be an intentional couple who cultivates rituals over the years.