Vows And The People That Keep Them

I get asked why I’m single often enough that I’ve learned to sort the question by the motive behind it.

Sometimes it arrives wrapped in flattery, a way of testing the water before anything romantic gets attempted. “someone like you, single?“…. which is less a question than an opening move. Sometimes it comes from a person in the same situation who’s fishing for validation, hoping I’ll say something that makes their own circumstance feel less like failure. And sometimes it’s genuine bewilderment, based on whatever impression they’ve formed of me, as though singleness requires an explanation the way an unexplained absence does.

What I’ve noticed is how most people answer it. There’s a forced brightness that gives the whole thing away. Singleness as a waiting room for something better, or a circumstance that was never chosen, or a wound still healing. I have met very few people who are single and genuinely content for reasons that have nothing to do with relational damage. Most contentment I encounter is really relief. At least I don’t have to endure that anymore. Which is understandable, and real, but it isn’t the same thing as peace.

I was talking recently with someone who fell squarely into one of those categories, and the conversation left me turning something over. I countered by asking what marriage actually brings that singleness doesn’t. When the question doesn’t trigger defensiveness, the answer is nearly always the same word: Companionship. Partnership. Someone in it with you.

And that’s a blessing. I don’t dismiss it. But what almost no one names is the cost.

Marriage tethers you to another person at the deepest level a human being can be tethered. Not just legally or financially, but at the level of your daily peace, your sense of safety, your spiritual formation. Their struggles become your struggles. Their battles become your battles. You do not get to opt out of the weather in their soul.

And here is what I’ve watched, over and over: you can make the promises, say the vows, sign the papers….. and the other person can still leave. At any time. For any reason.

I left my own marriage over affairs and abuse, which is a category Scripture treats seriously and which I won’t relitigate here. But that’s not the pattern that unsettles me. What unsettles me is watching people leave. Christians, people who stood before God and a congregation and swore something… because they weren’t feeling it anymore. Because the discipline required stopped seeming worth it. Because the work of love got harder than the reward felt.

Not betrayal. Not cruelty. Just depletion of interest…. and the widely accepted permission to act on it.

I watched an interview recently with an older gentleman who was asked how you know whether to marry someone. His answer was sincere and unglamorous, and it has been sitting in me since.

He said: only marry someone if you can picture them old, their mind gone, their body failing, you as the primary caretaker…. and you can still choose to love them.

That’s it. That’s what the vow actually promises, stripped of the flowers and the reception. Not “I will love you while you remain attractive and interesting and capable of loving me back,” but “I will love you when you cannot reciprocate at all, when you don’t know my name, when loving you costs everything and returns nothing I can feel.”

Almost nobody is thinking about that when they get married. The assumption is a permanent present tense. Both of you young, both of you desirable, both of you receiving as much as you give. So when bodies fail, or when the other person becomes less appealing than some available alternative, leaving starts to look reasonable. And then someone is left alone precisely at the moment they most needed the promise to hold.

This is the piece that tips me toward singleness. Not fear of commitment. Fear of being on the receiving end of someone else’s revoked one, with no say in it and no act on my part capable of stopping it.

The Difference Between a Contract and a Covenant

Scripture does not treat marriage as a contract. A contract is an exchange of considerations, enforceable while both parties perform.

A covenant, berith, is something else. In the ancient world, covenants were cut, animals divided, the parties passing between the pieces as if to say: may this be done to me if I break faith. The binding was not conditional on the other party’s performance. It was a self-imposed obligation with death as its stake.

When God cut covenant with Abram, something startling happened. A smoking fire pot and flaming torch passed between the pieces: God alone, moving through while Abram slept (Genesis 15:12-18). Only one party walked the path. God bound Himself to a covenant whose keeping did not depend on Abram’s faithfulness, and Abram was not faithful, and God kept it anyway.

This is the theological ground under marriage, and it’s why Malachi’s language is so severe. God says He hates the putting away, and calls it dealing treacherously against the wife of your youth. “she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (Malachi 2:14-16).

The word for treachery is the word for betrayal, for breaking faith. Not “the arrangement ended.” Betrayal.

And Ecclesiastes is blunt about vows generally: “when you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay ” (Ecclesiastes 5:4-5). Better never to promise than to promise and walk away. Which suggests the casualness with which we make these promises may be its own sin, separate from the breaking.

Here’s the thing I keep running into, in the little I’ve dated and the relationships I’ve had: how weightless words have become.

People say I love you without any real freight behind it, sometimes on a first date, sometimes to a person they don’t yet know. And I’ve come to understand that till death do us part is not different in kind. It’s the same easy currency.

Which brings me to what I find genuinely difficult. Christ says let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil (Matthew 5:37). The point isn’t that oaths are forbidden so much as that a person of integrity shouldn’t need them. The ordinary word should already be binding. But we’ve inverted it. We use the heaviest possible words precisely because our ordinary ones carry nothing, and then we discover the heavy words don’t hold either.

I have no mechanism for distinguishing, in advance, between a person whose vow is a covenant and a person whose vow is a mood. Neither does anyone else. That’s the actual risk, and it isn’t managed by better screening. Marriage requires handing someone the power to devastate you, on the strength of words that our whole culture, including the church, has agreed can be taken back.

But I have to be fair to the other side too.

If the risk of a broken covenant were sufficient reason not to enter one, God Himself would never have entered any. He knew Israel would break faith. Hosea was commanded to marry a woman who would be unfaithful, as a living picture of God’s relationship to His people…. and God did not decline the covenant on the grounds that it would be betrayed (Hosea 1:2, 3:1). He entered it knowing. He kept it knowing.

So the vulnerability of covenant is not an argument against covenant. It’s the nature of it.

The whole point of a promise is that it binds you when circumstances would release you; a vow that only holds when holding is easy was never a vow.

Ephesians grounds marriage in Christ and the church. Husbands loving wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). This means the model for the marriage vow is a Groom who did not leave. Who was betrayed by everyone close to Him and stayed. Whose covenant loyalty, hesed, the steadfast love the Psalms return to endlessly, held when every human party to it had failed.

And that same hesed shows up outside romance entirely. Ruth said to Naomi, where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge (Ruth 1:16)—a covenant vow, made by a widow to her mother-in-law, with no romantic component and no benefit to herself. Which means the covenant faithfulness I’m afraid of never receiving is something I could still practice, and be practiced toward me, outside of marriage. The virtue isn’t marital. It’s covenantal, and it has other rooms.

So I’m left in a more honest place than where I started.

My hesitation isn’t really about marriage. It’s about whether the people making these promises understand what they’re saying, in a culture, including the church, that has largely normalized taking them back. And that’s a legitimate observation about the current state of things, but it’s not a theological argument against covenant itself. God’s assessment of marriage didn’t change because we became casual about it.

What the old man said remains the right test, and I’d extend it further: the question isn’t only whether I could love someone through the failing body and the lost mind.

It’s whether I could find someone whose yes means what God’s yes means. Someone for whom till death is a description of an obligation rather than a sentiment about the present moment.

That person may exist. Scripture assumes such people do, or the command to keep faith would be cruel. But I’ve stopped pretending the search is low-stakes, and I’ve stopped accepting the easy accounting where marriage is all companionship and no exposure.

For now I’d rather be single and clear-eyed than married to someone whose vow evaporates the first time keeping it costs something.

That isn’t bitterness. It’s just refusing to spend heavy words lightly. Which is, as far as I can tell, exactly what God has always asked of anyone who makes them.