The illusion of consensual marriage

Over at First Things, Andrew Peach has written a beautiful reflection on fatherhood in the context of lamenting its demise.  You should read the whole thing, but here's a snippet:

Faith in fatherhood, when such faith has existed, has always been faith in a tradition, which is to say faith in a communally and historically based institution that is wiser and more robust than any individual’s desires, whims, or considered judgments. Even before the children arrive and he is standing on the altar, the young father-in-the-making can hardly be said to be giving full consent to his marriage vows. The groom has little idea what he is getting himself into when he agrees to love his bride “for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Legally speaking, no groom could ever satisfy the criterion of assent necessary for a binding contract; he only understands the content of the vows he has made long after he has uttered them.

To speak more metaphorically, what vowing spouses are doing is putting up a fence around themselves so that the seeds of the relationship will have the protection and space needed to grow. In a negative sense, they are barring the exits, but they are doing so because the positive goods to be attained—for them, their children, and society—are too good and often too unexpected to be entrusted to fleeting feelings of fidelity. As horse farmer and communitarian author Wendell Berry observes, marriage—like friendships, families, and neighborhoods—“is a form of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape. . . . But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness.”

Compare this to the essay by Jeff Redding that I posted a couple of days ago, in which the self-transcendence of marriage is dismissed as a "mausoleum" and marriage participants as being "held hostage."  Now ask, which view is more firmly grounded in an authentic vision of human nature?  The marginalization of marriage cannot help but marginalize the understanding of the human person as a social creature who is capable of -- and suited for -- relational commitments that are deeper and more foundational (to both personal identity and society) than those that are entered into based on readily discernible and calculable self-interest (especially to the extent that self-interest is equated with short-term gratification).