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.