I fear that the images of family in Twilight may encourage us to think that we have to be glittering, immortal Cullens in order to know happiness and love. I worry about how easily Bella leaves her imperfect family behind. In doing so, she isolates herself from the way they care for her. Even if their care is imperfect, they love her and want good things for her. Bella cuts herself off from the love and accountability they offer. By trading them in for the Cullens, she loses the opportunity and challenge involved in loving real, messy, imperfect human beings.
God’s gift of family is a good gift. It’s not perfect though. We can be grateful that we don’t need a good and beautiful family to solve all our problems or to save us. Family will let us down. Christian hope, though, will not.
THINK ABOUT IT/TALK ABOUT IT
Do you have an image of the “perfect” family? Does your family try to put on a perfect face to the world?
Have you, like Bella, experienced the family as a disappointing place?
Are you tempted to “check out” of your family life when it disappoints and annoys?
Have you ever experienced God’s grace through weakness? Through opportunities that ordinary life provides to care for and love other weak people?
How can ordinary, weak people reflect God’s goodness to the world?
This chapter has argued that the family should not be idealized, that we should accept the weakness of our families, but this should never be understood as an excuse for abuse. If you or someone you know is affected by physical, sexual, or emotional abuse in your family, you need to get away from the abuse. Talk to someone—a pastor, a teacher, a friend—who can help. Visit www.stopfamilyviolence.org for resources for those experiencing family violence.
1. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 54.
2. Twilight, 54.
3. Stephenie Meyer, New Moon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 398.
4. Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 391.
Chapter 6
For Eternity
The Good, the Bad, and the Reality
of Marriage in Twilight
BELLA’S FEELINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE are at odds with her wish to be with Edward forever. Why would a girl willing to become a vampire for her love balk at the prospect of marrying him? Though she is terrified of marriage, Bella eventually agrees to marry Edward and is ultimately happy in her choice. Her worries about marriage contrast with other views of marriage in the saga, in which marriage is shown as an ideal eternal commitment and the basis of a happy shared life for the couple. How do the different messages about marriage in Meyer’s story help us to think about marriage from a Christian perspective?
MIXED FEELINGS
At the beginning of Breaking Dawn, Bella prepares to marry Edward. Once she is his wife, he will finally make her a vampire. Her agreement, though, has been given against her instincts. She panics at the thought of marriage and can’t reconcile the idea with her wildly romantic feelings for Edward. She explains to him, “I’m not that girl, Edward. The one who gets married right out of high school like some small-town hick who got knocked up by her boyfriend!”1 Bella associates marriage with reduced opportunities and disdains it as a traditional route that doesn’t make sense for her. Her mother married young and has trained her to think of early marriage as a certain mistake, a mistake she’s too smart to make. Despite Edward’s enthusiasm and her own desire to be with him forever, she can’t shake the negative feelings she has about marriage.
In contrast, Edward’s feelings about marriage are all positive. He tells Bella about the kind of human being he was before he became a vampire so many years ago. Edward explains, “If I had found you, there isn’t a doubt in my mind how I would have proceeded. I was that boy, who would have—as soon as I discovered that you were what I was looking for—gotten down on one knee and endeavored to secure your hand. I would have wanted you for eternity, even when the word didn’t have quite the same connotations.”2 Edward is clearly not afraid of commitment, and he seeks marriage because he wants to be bound to Bella.
Neither of Bella’s parents thinks the marriage is the best idea. She especially dreads telling her mother, whose past experience means that “early marriage was higher up on her blacklist than boiling live puppies.”3 Bella argues that people will assume the only reason two teenagers would possibly get married is if she were pregnant. Edward offers an alternative reason though. In his mind, two people their age would obviously marry because of love.
Edward offers to go to Vegas if Bella doesn’t want to have a big white wedding. They end up, though, with an old-fashioned fairy tale wedding, one that pleases Alice and Edward as well as family and friends. On her wedding day, Bella is afraid to look in the mirror and see her image in her wedding dress. She’s sure the sight will make her panic, yet everyone agrees she is a stunning bride. Her beauty on her wedding day is a preview of the vampire beauty that will be hers when Edward finally transforms her. Marriage is the condition and, in some ways, even the cause of her moving from ordinary to extraordinary, dissatisfaction to happiness, awkward teenager to gorgeous goddess. High expectations to place on marriage!
Any concern that she might panic, along with all Bella’s ambivalence, evaporates the moment she actually marries Edward. Bella says, “I saw just how silly I’d been for fearing this—as if it were an unwanted birthday gift or an embarrassing exhibition, like the prom. I looked into Edward’s shining, triumphant eyes and knew that I was winning, too. Because nothing else mattered but that I could stay with him.”4
Once the wedding is over, Bella never regrets agreeing to marry Edward.
DESPISING MARRIAGE
Bella’s negative feelings about marriage may resonate with readers of the Twilight Saga. The world has changed a lot in the past couple generations, and young women now have options besides early marriage. Bella associates marriage with the limiting of opportunities, and she has to go through a major change of heart before she can see anything good in marrying Edward.
More and more people are delaying or rejecting marriage. In 2008, the average age for a first marriage was twenty-seven for men and twenty-five for women. In 1950, men married at an average age of twenty-three and women at age twenty.5 In an article from the Washington Post, Mark Regnerus reports that “many women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they’re at least in their late 20s…Actively considering marriage when you’re 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it—it’s that scandalous.”6 There are many reasons for this trend toward delaying marriage until later in life. Christians need to express concern about a number of those reasons.
One reason for delaying or even despising the idea of marriage is that we are afraid it will interfere with our personal freedom and our opportunities to complete our education and have successful careers. If we buy into this, we assume that the best kind of freedom is a freedom in which we are free from other people, from responsibilities and obligations that would keep us from being able to do whatever it is that we as individuals happen to like best. It also assumes that the best way to define opportunity is to think of it in terms of being able to make a lot of money, wield a lot of power, and demand a lot of prestige.
Christians, though, have exciting reasons for thinking about freedom and opportunity in very different ways. Christian freedom is not the unrestrained ability to do whatever we want to do at any particular moment. This is a good thing, since that kind of freedom would leave us at the mercy of our worst tendencies and our most sinful inclinations. Jesus offers us a much more beautiful kind of freedom, not a freedom from any kind of guidance or responsibility but a freedom for loving and serving Him. Part of the good news of the Christian life is that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). Jesus gives us the ability to use this freedom to “serve one
another in love” (verse 13). Without the power Jesus gives us, we’re not free to serve and love. Instead, we’re trapped by our me-first, self-absorbed wants. In giving us Christian freedom, Jesus enables us to care for others in everyday ways. He gives us the freedom, for instance, to serve people who are poor and suffering or the freedom to love and serve the people we have to live with day in and day out.
According to the good news that God offers us, opportunity may also look very different, in the Christian life, from the opportunity to be successful in the eyes of the world. Jesus gives us the opportunity to have truly good lives, truly abundant lives. He frees us from the power of sin and selfishness and shows us ways to live in love.
This means that worry about lost freedom or reduced opportunity isn’t a Christian reason to avoid marriage. Marriage, in fact, may be a place where God can train us for this kind of freedom and offer us the kind of opportunity that will make us truly happy. It’s by no means the only place where this kind of freedom and opportunity can happen, but marriage is one place where God can free us for lives that are not for us alone and give us the opportunity to know commitment and service to someone else. Yes, marriage comes with commitment and responsibility, but that is part of the joy of marriage.
I’m certainly not saying that all Christians must marry young or marry at all to know God’s freedom and opportunity. I am saying that, as people who learn what freedom and opportunity are from Jesus and not from this world, we don’t need to buy into Bella’s fears or her tendency to despise marriage.
Bella also sees marriage as a far too ordinary response to her experience of wild love. We see a recurring theme in the Twilight Saga when Bella thinks through her feelings about marriage at the beginning of Breaking Dawn. That recurring theme involves a tendency to look down on ordinary, everyday human life. Bella sees her love as anything but ordinary, but she thinks of marriage as settling for the status quo:
I briefly contemplated my issues with words like fiancé, wedding, husband, etc. I just couldn’t put it together in my head…I just couldn’t reconcile a staid, respectable, dull concept like husband with my concept of Edward. It was like casting an archangel as an accountant; I couldn’t visualize him in any commonplace role.7
Again, though, God loves the ordinary, common things of this world. God uses them and works through them. A loving, faithful marriage is not “staid, respectable, dull.” It is a place where God’s goodness can be shown to the world and where God can do new things in our lives. Marriage is a good gift from God.
ROMANTICIZING MARRIAGE
We must reject the all-too-easy road of simply despising marriage. At the same time, we need to reject another problematic option: glorifying and romanticizing marriage. Many of us resonate more with Alice’s joy in putting together a dream wedding than with Bella’s hesitation about dresses, flowers, and public parties. Little girls are taught to dream about their wedding day.
We also live in a society in which “dream weddings” have become big business. My parents, like most people their age, had a wedding reception in their church basement. There were sandwiches, cake, and punch, and my grandmother made my mom’s wedding dress. My husband and I got married at church too, but we had a big party afterward with dinner and dancing. My mom and I bought my dress at a fancy boutique. When I look back on my wedding day, though, the joy I remember has almost nothing to do with the money we spent on a party and everything to do with commitment to my husband, being surrounded by the people we love, and celebrating marriage with a wedding service that was about worshiping God.
The industry that sells weddings to brides and grooms has grown enormously since I got married. There are a lot of social pressures, for brides especially, to keep up with the trends and try to have everything perfect. It’s routine for people to go deep into debt to pay for their “dream wedding.” There are jokes about “bridezilla,” a bride who becomes so focused on things going her way that she becomes a horrible, selfish monster who gives no thought to people around her.
There’s nothing wrong with celebrations, and there’s nothing wrong with the excitement that surrounds them. It is easy, though, for a wedding to be about social pressure, big spending, and turning the bride into the star of her own show. It’s easy for it to become a selfish production when it ought to be about a community celebration of two people’s promise to be faithful to each other and to serve God side by side.
All of the expense and excitement of the fairy tale wedding can be a distraction from the goodness and difficulty of marriage itself. It can also contribute to putting marriage into a place where it does not belong in human life, to making marriage the dream that a young woman lives for. The most important thing Christians can do when thinking about marriage is to choose a partner wisely. When we turn marriage into a fairy tale dream, a dream that we have to pursue no matter what, we are in real danger of choosing poorly.
A Christian marriage is on solid ground when both husband and wife are centered on Christ and trust that being married to this person will help them to better love and serve God. Both people being Christians, though, is not all it takes. If we’re to marry, we’d better marry someone kind, someone who supports and respects us, someone who will shoulder responsibility. Other people can help us to see if we are choosing wisely, but a fuzzy dream of a wedding day can make it hard to see the wisdom of our choices.
Centering all our dreams on marriage can make it difficult to see that happiness and fulfillment are found in God and not in another person. Happiness and fulfillment are certainly not found in being a princess for a day. We don’t have to be married to be happy. We don’t have to be married to be fulfilled. We don’t have to be married to grow up. The suggestion, in the Twilight Saga, that Bella needs marriage to be fulfilled is a dangerous one.
ANOTHER POSSIBILITY
In our culture, we don’t have much of a concept of the single life as a significant and important one. There is certainly no strong, positive portrait of the single life in the Twilight Saga. People may delay marriage, wishing to remain unattached, but singleness itself is not seen as a special way that God calls some people to live in relationship with Him. Christians have always affirmed that being single is a special way to love and serve God, not a negative thing we have to accept if we’re not lucky enough to find our Edward. The Christian single life is a positive way of life with an important place in God’s way of doing things.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul gives some advice to the folks in the church he’s writing to about how we should think about marriage and singleness. The most important message that guides his advice is that “the time is short” (7:29). Paul, someone who was always looking forward to the return of Jesus, was deeply aware of the importance of time. He wanted all Christians, single and married, to devote ourselves completely to God, to use the very short time we are given to love and serve with all that we are.
Paul points out that singleness gives Christians special opportunities for devotion to God. As a concerned pastor, he tells the people in the church:
I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. (1 Corinthians 7:32–34)
While Paul affirms marriage as a good thing, he doesn’t want anyone to forget that God is more important than anything. Being single creates freedom to devote life to God. With love, Paul wishes for at least some in the church to have the special freedom of the single life, a life that enables complete devotion to the Lord.
I think Paul would approve of the thoughts of writers Christine ColÓn and Bonnie Field, who encourage Christians to reclaim the good of the single life and to celeb
rate the ways that God is working there. They encourage us to “resist the temptation to think that our lives will only really start once we are married. Rather than existing in a holding pattern, waiting for marriage, and basing our ideas of God’s faithfulness on whether or not he provides us with the spouse and children we desire, we must work toward developing a more complex faith.”8 These wise thoughts apply not only specifically to the good of the single life, but generally to all of us who are tempted to think that fulfillment or real life can be found in any other place than in a relationship with the living God. We need to dream not of fairy tale weddings, but of the things that Jesus can and will do with our lives as He transforms us.
THE GOOD OF MARRIAGE
Because most of the churches we know emphasize marriage so much, it might surprise you to learn that there have been times in history when Christians had to defend the idea that marriage is a gift from God. Some people even claimed that marriage is evil. In the ancient church, an African pastor named Augustine took on the task of defending marriage to people who believed sex was shameful and the single life was the only good Christian life. Augustine’s thoughts about the good God works through marriage have influenced other Christians down through the centuries. He names three good things God does through Christian marriage: faithfulness between married couples, the good of children, and the way marriage can direct people toward God. Selfish human beings are capable of making marriage a very bad thing, but God uses these three good things to turn us away from our selfishness.
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