What is a blog? Here’s how it’s defined at blogs4God:

A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.
A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life and what
is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, although there
are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

What is this blog? It’s an affirmation of marriage as an enterprise
worthy of pursuit, a daily journal of my thoughts concerning my own happy
marriage.

We live in a culture
that is hostile to marriage as a lifelong commitment between a man and
a woman. It celebrates weddings, yes, but it also celebrates divorces.
Why wouldn’t it? We hear more about happy divorces than we do about happy
marriages. And even bitter divorces serve to reinforce the idea that
marriage
makes people miserable—just think how much worse off those pitiful
people would be had they stayed married.

I’m married, and I love it.
I think marriage is a divine gift, the natural state of mankind, the only
condition in which all but a very few people can
live full lives—the first thing in creation that was not good was
man’s aloneness.

It’s difficult, though, because we have no comprehensive set of rules,
no manual to cover every situation, no way for both my wife and me to be
happy with each other all the time. On top of that, our entertainment media
tell
us that married people are bitter, bored, and trapped in an existence with
no variety, sex, or passion. (Last week I heard a character on a TV show
say, "Do you think it’s a coincidence that monogamy rhymes with
monotony?")
And then I see the real-life marriages of my friends, family members, and
acquaintances fall apart every day, while the new national pastime is finding
unique and
humorous ways to complain about spouses.

I took a sociology class in college in which it came to the professor’s
attention that some students were cheating on tests. He gave the entire class
a short lecture basically telling the cheaters (he did not single them out)
to grow up. He said that every student who earns a degree by cheating chips
away at the value of all degrees from that particular university. He said
that when you graduate without learning the diploma becomes a meaningless
piece
of paper rather than a certificate of achievement. Nothing devalues the knowledge,
hard work, and achievement of students who do not cheat, but the value of
their diplomas decline as their school becomes known as a school whose students
do
not take learning seriously.

Something similar can be said about marriage. With every affair, every
divorce, every loveless coupling, people view the institution of marriage
with less
respect, which leads to more affairs, more divorces, and more loveless couplings,
which devalues the institution, which leads to more…etc. It almost
seems like a societal conspiracy to discourage contentment. It takes nothing
away
from the love I feel for my wife. It takes nothing away from the lifelong
commitment we made to each other. But even so, I wish we were part of a stronger
institution.

I’m hoping now to begin undermining the conspirators. On this blog, I
plan to celebrate marriage, to share my joy with others, and to communicate
things I’ve learned about being married. Mostly, though, I hope to encourage
and be encouraged by others who might feel oppressed by the pervasive negative
sentiments in our culture and to provide an opportunity for discussion
among others who love marriage or want to love marriage.