She was serious when she said that the women's movement attacked her, her children, me, her family, and that somehow, trying to live a Catholic marriage made the questions themselves incomprehensible. That vow imposes nothing on my wife. In that vow I take on, before God and the Christian community, an infinite obligation. In that vow there is no listing of this or that right, no limitations. In that vow I leave behind all of my rights in favour of something much bigger.
Marriage is an exchange.
Both the man and the woman promise to abandon the self to make room for that unconditional claim. That's why the modern debate over rights makes little or no sense in the context of Catholic marriage. We have, each of us, man and woman, in Catholic marriages given up our individual rights permanently. If we, as husbands and wives, fulfill our obligations we will eventually all lose ourselves to become, in each individual couple, one mind, one body, one spirit. When we were married almost 18 years ago I know this vision of what the marriage vow was about was very clear to me emotionally.