Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. – Genesis 2:24

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Douglas Mainwaring, whose same-sex attraction broke up his marriage nearly twenty years ago, has a poignant essay in Public Discourse about the powerful witness of a faithful marriage. In his essay, Mainwaring describes how the marriage and family life of one of his son’s friends helped lead him to reconciliation with his wife and the recovery of his own marriage.

When his son would come home from visiting this friend, “All I had to do was look into Chris’s eyes,” Mainwaring writes, “to see that he wished he had a family like theirs—a family with a gregarious, big-hearted, and affectionate Mom and Dad who clearly loved each other. I knew that this was precisely what I had deprived Chris and his brother of.”

“It was this very loving marriage,” Mainwaring goes on to say, “that first caused me to wonder if I had made a huge mistake in divorcing my wife and breaking our family apart.” Ultimately, the influence of this marriage and this family on his son caused Mainwaring to decide that he “had no choice but to find a way to bring our family back together.”

Mainwaring’s essay is entitled, “Your Marriage: You Have No Idea of the Good You Are Doing,” and this is the point of his essay. The parents of his son’s friend had no idea that simply by faithfully living out their marriage, they were having such a profound impact on Mainwaring and his son. By recounting this story, Mainwaring wants his readers to understand that their own faithful marriages can also affect the lives of others in profound ways they could never imagine. 

Take a few minutes to read Mainwaring’s entire essay, and you’ll gain a new appreciation for the power of an ordinary marriage.