People give you A LOT of advice when you get married. Actually, on second thought, I'd not exactly call it 'advice'--its more like they comment upon marriage as an institution so that you can get initiated into it before the wedding day. That way you know what you are getting into, or so they seem to think. My then fiance and I realized after awhile that people must have pretty awful marriages. Very rarely did anyone express genuine joy that we were getting married--instead it was all warnings and jokes about how terrible it was to marry someone. But, it also became clear that very few Christians have any idea about what marriage is all about, theologically. So, then, marriage becomes a perversion of what it should be. Not only that, we apply the wrong expectations to it--no wonder we get disappointed!

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

''How is marriage related to the Kingdom which is to come? How is it related to the cross, the death and the resurrection of Christ? What, in other words, makes it a sacrament?

. . . We do not even remember today that marriage is, as everything else in 'this world' a fallen and distorted marriage, and that it needs not to be blessed and 'solemnized' . . . but restored. This restoration, furthermore, is in Christ and this means in His life, death, and resurrection and ascension to heaven, in the pentecostal inauguration of the 'new eon,' in the Church as the sacrament of all this. Needless to say, this restoration infinitely transcends the idea of the 'Christian family,' and gives marriage cosmic and universal dimensions.

Here is the whole point. As long as we visualize marriage as the concern of those alone who are being married, as something that happens to them and not to the whole Church, and therefore, to the world itself, we shall never understand the truly sacramental meaning of marriage: the great mystery to which St. Paul refers when he says, ''But I speak concerning Christ and the Church.'' We must understand that the real theme, ''content'' and object of this sacrament is not ''family,'' but love. Family as such, family in itself, can be a demonic distortion of love---and there are harsh words about it in the Gospel: ''A man's foes shall be those of his own household'' (Mt. 10:36). In this sense the sacrament of divine love, as the all-embracing mystery of being itself, and it is for this reason that it concerns the whole Church, and through the Church, the whole world.''

I am certainly no expert on marriage! But, I think this quote from the Orthodox theologian goes a long way to showing what marriage can be when it is not distorted. I also like how it shows that we are not simply in categories of married and single, but we all participate in marriage, just as we are part of one Body. It is a great mystery and I barely can get my thoughts around it, but somehow I think its so much bigger than the 1950s family ideal or Focus on the Family mentality that we as the church has set as a standard for what marriage is. With that, you simply get disillusionment and bad advice before getting married.