SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL. I held her hands and was with her while she cried. She had an obsessive desire to get married. She felt “old” (these were her words), she described herself as not being very attractive and seeing the years go by without the arrival of her “knight in shining armor,” her despair grew.
There are valid reasons to get married, but they have nothing to do with Age or demands from the cultural environment. Men and women should enter into matrimony through a relationship based on unconditional love. This is what should move us to pronounce the marriage vows, which implies being together until death parts us.
We should enter into matrimony when we’re mature enough to accept and understand this union implies sacrifice and surrender of the will; we can only get to that point if we deeply love the one who will be our spouse. lf we do so just out of social pressure, without love as a guarantee, there’s a very high chance of failure. And, as Ellen G. White says, “Marriage affects the afterlife both in this world and in the world to come” (Messages to Youth People, ch. 148, p. 435). A woman who commits to marriage should be willing to be a helpmate to a man whose devotion to God is a priority in his life, and thus they can serve the Lord together.
Eagerness to experience sexuality, thinking that every excess is allowed within marriage, is the wrong reason to get married. Once the first emotions of the honey moon have passed, many married women don’t enjoy this aspect of married life. Sexual impulses are not the best guide for making the decision to get married. Many women “are forced to a life of hardship, pain, and suffering, because of the uncontrollable passions of men who bear the name of husband—more rightly could they be called brutes…. Many a woman has had her fine and tender sensibilities outraged, because the marriage relatton allowed him whom she called husband to be brutal in his treatment of her. His love she found to be of so base a quality that she became disgusted” (Ibid., ch. 156, pp. 462, 463).
Dear young lady, I invite you to enjoy being single and find a reason for living every day in the company of Jesus who will never fail you. And if one day you decide to get married, may it be for the right reasons.