Marriage is more than your love for each other.
It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance,
through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of
time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in
marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God
causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his
kingdom.
In your love, you see only the heaven of your
own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of
responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own
private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a
status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to
rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love
for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.
As high as God is above man, so high are the
sanctity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity,
the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains
the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "
A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell" in
Letters and Papers from Prison