Great post - thanks.
As a “mental health professional,” and as someone who took it upon himself over a several year period to study Aristotle in depth as an adult when I realized the gaping hole left by my education, I find the tenor and content of this article nicely done.
The vows are the marriage. Everything else in the marriage changes over time, but the vows remain. They are not even just the glue that holds the marriage together - they are the marriage.
The integrity and understanding that enables a person to take the vows with the depth of clarity and resolution they require are seldom present in the young these days, and were probably only ever instilled in the young quite infrequently even the the golden ages of history.
However, with so very little societal emphasis on virtue in this era of unbridled narcissism, and indeed with an active antipathy towards virtue pressuring people from all sides, the process of ethical maturation that might lead to keeping the vows through the vicissitudes and temptations of life is all too frequently eroded and undermined.
To listen carefully to my patients, and to the vows taken and explained at the numerous weddings I’ve attended over the years, and to the words of friends and neighbors long married, and to the rich layers of thoughts and feelings that form my own mental landscape - these have impressed upon me the centrality and power and sacredness of the institution of marriage, and of the vows taken and hopefully kept. It is one of the very few recipes in life for achieving that elusive goal that our society has so cheapened with poor imitations: happiness. Happiness of the most true and deep variety.
Aristotle's Ethics has a name: eudaemonism ...
From my dictionary: eudaemonia ... "... in Aristotle's philosophy, happiness, the main universal goal, derived from a life of activity governed by reason."