News

SAN DIEGO, CA August 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “It’s an opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice. Lay your life down for someone else.” This is how one of many young people interviewed for a powerful new video about love and marriage produced by the Ruth Institute describes the purpose of marriage.

Through a variety of interviews, the video, a project of The Emerging Leaders program, highlights the intense desire that people in the youngest generations have for self-sacrificial, unconditional and lifelong love – and the hope that they have that they will be able to find it.

“They would walk through fire for one another,” says another young woman, describing the attitude a married couple should have towards one another. “I just long for that connection with another person. To be able to love like that.”

The video concludes with the youth each committing themselves “to lifelong married love.”

“I love this video,” Ruth Institute President Jennifer Roback Morse told LifeSiteNews.com, explaining that at the heart of the “I Commit” video are “hope, commitment, and a fresh start for the institution of marriage in American society and beyond.”

“Most young people are just drifting in the cultural soup of casual sex,” she said. “But the religiously serious, college educated young adults know what they are about.  They are intentionally living a counter-cultural lifestyle.  We are here to promote them and support them in any way we can.”

“Many young people have already experienced divorce, the divorce of their parents,” she adds. “‘The kids will be fine as long as their parents are happy’ is a myth that has been soundly disproven by social science. Today’s young adults know for themselves, from their own experience, that this is a lie. They do not want to impose the costs of divorce on their own children. They want to get married and stay married.”

As previously reported by LifeSiteNews, there are signs indicating that Generation X married couples prefer monogamy to divorce. A survey by the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project confirmed that the number of divorces has been in steady decline since the rate of divorce peaked in 1980.