Hidden behind your sex-motivated desire to get married as a Christian man are all the drawbacks of marriage.
Make sure you consider these costs before getting married.
Otherwise you will do what most Christian men do: jump into marriage motivated purely by the desire to FINALLY have sex, and ignore all the costs of marriage.
There are serious drawbacks to getting married. Just like there are drawbacks to anything in life. This doesn’t mean marriage isn’t a great thing, just that it has costs. Just like Christianity has costs.
Even Christ taught that you have to count the cost of discipleship [Luke 14:28-30]- because it will require you to give up something.
1 – Sexual Access
For starters, you make a vow to your wife that you will forsake all others and commit to her on your wedding day.
While this shouldn’t be difficult for most Christians, it is a scary thought.
If you have been living the Christian lifestyle, you should avoid extramarital sex of all types – that’s a biblical command.
So this is nothing different than what you have already been doing so it’s more of a secular consequence.
2 – Money
Having a Wife is expensive. It’s another person to take care of.
Even if you both work, she will have upkeep costs [Feminine hygiene, self-care, makeup etc.] that shouldn’t be neglected in your calculation on whether or not marriage is for you.
Your wife will be at least 1.5x as expensive as you are.
If you have financial goals in life, they will be slowed down by marriage.
Unless both you and your wife are on the exact same page about finances, expect to have your financial goals slowed by an assortment of living and family expenses.
3 – Free Time
When you are single, you can do that you want, when you want.
The value of this freedom shouldn’t be taken lightly. This is especially true if freedom is one of your core values.
When you are single, you have nothing limiting your choices except the commandments of God.
There is a reason many husbands refer to their wife as the “ole ball and chain”.
It’s not a helpful analogy nor is it useful.
It’s especially not useful to the older Christians if their goal is to ensure more Christians are born – they are discouraging and disparaging the very institution that brings those children into the world.
But many Christian men are too depressed to even care.
They jumped into marriage motivated by their sex drive, discovered marriage wasn’t what they thought it was, now all they can do is whine.
That aside, marriage will cost you much of your free time, especially as kids come into the picture.
That doesn’t mean you won’t find pockets of time to have to yourself, but it will not be as often as it was when you were single.
4 – Hobbies
Related to time loss, you will also lose some of your hobbies. This occurs because you need time to engage with hobbies, and your time will be reduced.
Many Christian’s will encourage you to sacrifice everything you enjoy on the altar of “selflessness” to be better for your family.
Frankly, their logic never made sense to me.
I’ve personally never experienced fulfillment after sacrificing something.
Sometimes a sacrifice is just a sacrifice will not provide anything of value in return in this life.
The vast majority of the benefits of the Christian life are deferred until the afterlife.
But logistically speaking, if you have less free time after marriage, it follows that you will have less time for hobbies after marriage.
5 – Increased Responsibility
Responsibility. That mysterious thing that Jordan Peterson associates with “Fulfillment”. If you think you have responsibility now, it will only increase in marriage. It will double when you get married, and it will double with each child you have.
Personally, I haven’t found an increase in responsibility to be correlated with increased fulfillment. I’m not convinced quite sure that fulfillment is a guarantee in life.
What I do know is there is a linear relationship between increased responsibility and increased life dissatisfaction for me personally.
Now maybe I’m just different than most of the population. So take this with a grain of salt. But your responsibility levels will increase exponentially within marriage.
6 – Kids
Kids are undoubtedly one of life’s greatest sacrifices. For many Christian dads, they sacrifice everything they want to be so that their kids can have a better life.
They give up their identity and pour themselves into their kids.
Then the church applauds this as noble, but personally, I’m not so convinced.
I’ve seen plenty of dad’s in the church pour everything into their kids for nothing.
They spend everything, both emotionally and physically to raise good kids, and then those kids grow up to reject the truth of God’s word. Then the father spends most of his nights popping sleeping pills because he has such insomnia and internal turmoil over his kids that he can’t sleep.
“But…fulfillment“.
It’s never guaranteed.
And by the time many Father’s kids leave the house, these men are a shell of what they once were.
They poured out everything without ever taking time to fill their own cup.
Now they are just an empty vessel without identity.
Conclusion
Make no mistake about it, there are costs to marriage.
Count the cost.
And if you have any degree of doubt about whether or not you should get married, don’t get married.
Wait.
You can always get married later.
But if you are a Christian, once you are married, you are locked in for life and there is nothing you can do about it.
So take that commitment seriously. It’s a blood oath.
