What makes marriage different from just living together? It's a question many people wrestle with, especially those new to faith. Beyond saying it's "sacred before God," what's the real difference?

This week at Crowd Church, Matt Edmundson tackled this head-on, sharing how his own thinking about marriage was completely broken. Growing up with divorced parents, he genuinely wondered if marriage was just an expensive party for something that probably wouldn't last anyway.

The Problem Isn't Marriage - It's Our Thinking About It

The statistics tell a revealing story. In 1970, seven out of ten adults were married in the UK. Today it's four out of ten, predicted to drop to just three out of ten by 2050. But people haven't stopped wanting committed relationships. So, instead, we've substituted marriage with cohabitation – living together without being married – which has increased by 144% in the last 30 years.

Culturally, then, the message has become that marriage is outdated, unnecessary, and even potentially harmful. Why tie yourself down legally when you can just live together? Why make promises you might not keep? Living together first makes sense - like test driving a car before you buy it, right?

But what if the problem isn't that marriage is broken, but that we've forgotten what marriage actually is?

God's Blueprint - Leave, Hold Fast, Become One

At the dawn of time, God gave us the original blueprint for marriage in Genesis 2:24: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

In this tiny verse, we discover three powerful truths about biblical marriage:

They Leave

This isn't just about moving out of your parents' house. It's a fundamental shift where the marriage bond takes priority over all other human relationships. It's leaving your lifestyle of singleness, your way of doing things, even those unconscious expectations about how Christmas should be done.

Practically, it means leaving behind gifts or love letters from exes. It means choosing to put your spouse first - above family, friends, career, everything. Matt reflects that if we truly grasped this revelation about leaving, it would transform our marriages. So many people get married wanting to keep one foot in their old way of living rather than truly leaving it behind.

They Hold Fast

The Hebrew word means to stick like glue, to bond permanently like super glue or five-minute epoxy resin. It's not "let's see how it goes" or "as long as we're happy." It's a deep, unbreakable covenant connection encompassing emotional, spiritual, and physical unity.

When you hold fast to your spouse, you don't need an emotional affair with another person. Men, especially, if you hold fast to your wife, you won't need to look at another woman ever. If you catch yourself doing that, remind yourself to hold fast to your wife.

Malachi puts it powerfully: "The Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant." God is a witness to how we treat our spouses. This isn't just a human agreement - it's a sacred covenant with God watching and participating.

Holding fast takes effort and intentionality. You cannot be passive in marriage. If you are, you're heading for danger, and you'll get there quickly.

They Become One Flesh

This is the mystery at the heart of marriage - two separate people becoming one unified whole in every aspect of life, especially (but not solely) in sex.

Matt shares how this was a massive barrier to Christianity for him personally. At 18, driven by testosterone and cultural messaging, the idea that sex before marriage was wrong seemed completely outdated. To quote George Michael, that well-known sage of wisdom: "Sex is natural, sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should."

When he started going to church, there was this older preacher who seemed to talk about sex every week - as though it was an evil thing. Matt didn't listen for months, thinking the guy was a bit of a nutter. He even prayed, "God, I can believe all this gospel stuff - just don't ask me to stop having sex before marriage, because I'm not going to do it."

But eventually, he came to a place of surrender, knowing God had a better plan even if he didn't particularly enjoy the idea at the time.

For Those in Complicated Situations

But it’s not always that black and white, and we can have complicated situations. Maybe you've recently come to faith and you're living with someone you love. Perhaps you've bought a house together. Maybe your partner isn't yet a Christian, but you are.

These are real-life situations that don't have simple answers. God's design for marriage and sexuality isn't about limiting life - it's about showing something beautiful and worth moving toward.

When Jesus met people in complicated situations, he didn't condemn them. He showed them a better way and gave them grace for the journey.

If you're in one of those situations:

• Don't hide it from God - He knows. You can talk to him without feeling condemned. He's not shocked by your circumstances
• Have honest conversations - Talk with someone you know, trust, and respect in the Lord who can help you navigate what's going on
• Remember God's grace - It covers you whilst you're figuring all this out

That said, if you were already a Christian and then started having sex outside of marriage, that's different. That requires repentance because you're acting against what you know to be true, and that has complications for your marriage.

Why Does This Matter?

Why should anyone care what an ancient book says about relationships? Because the principles actually work.

Research validates God's design:

• Two to three times higher satisfaction for sexually exclusive couples
• 50% lower divorce rates for those who prioritise their relationships
• More marriages stay together when couples don't live together before marriage

You might dismiss the source, but you can't dismiss the outcomes. The principles of covenant marriage work. If you want a good marriage, God's way is definitely the best.

Understanding Covenant vs Contract

Early in Matt's Christian walk, he had a tape series (ask your grandparents what a tape is) - six hours of teaching on covenants. He wore those tapes out listening repeatedly because he knew there was something he had to get from his head to his heart.

Through that study, he stopped dating - not for a set time, but it ended up being a couple of years. He studied scripture on covenant, marriage, relationships, and sex from cover to cover. That study, which lasted at least two years, changed his life completely.

When Sharon and Matt met, the question wasn't whether he could marry her - he knew pretty quickly he could. The question was whether he wanted to be in covenant with her. That's a different question entirely because a covenant is laying down your life for someone else.

It took a few weeks to make that decision, not because of uncertain feelings, but because of understanding the weight of what he was committing to. They didn't live together before marriage. They didn't have sex outside of marriage. They did it God's way.

Matt knew he was entering into a covenant, not a contract. He knew God witnessed this marriage and was involved. It was serious and had lasting effects for the rest of their lives. He wasn't looking for a way out because he understood what he was getting into.

How You See Marriage Changes Everything

How you see marriage, relationships, your spouse, and sex - all of that dictates how you approach it.

After 27 years of marriage, Matt can tell you it's still a wonderful thing. Not many people can say that. It doesn't mean it's easy or perfect - practising Christians still have a divorce rate of about 20-25%, which is both sad and bad.

But couples who attend religious services regularly are 50% less likely to divorce. There's something in this. Yes, there's still divorce in the church, but if you're active in your faith, that divorce rate halves.

There's even a shift in culture. Gen Z actually want marriage more than millennials did - 75% want to get married compared to only 43% of millennials. That's a massive swing. It seems the new generation isn't rejecting marriage, but rather the broken version of marriage they've seen or been sold.

Conversation Street - Real Questions, Real Answers

During the Conversation Street segment, some brilliant insights emerged from the community.

Are we differentiating between Christian marriage and civil marriage versus living together?

Absolutely. The talk focuses on Christian marriage - marriage for those who want to follow Jesus and the pattern God has laid down. Whilst the principles are good for everybody, this is specifically about covenant marriage before God.

Dan raised an interesting point: what about couples who were married (whether church or civil) and then both became Christians? Is there a decision to make, to say to God, "We didn't quite know what we were getting into then - this is what we're going to do now"? Perhaps it was legal back then, but now it has become a covenant.

Sharon noted that life is messy. When people have committed to marriage on one set of understanding, and then, as Christians, their understanding changes and deepens with what God intended, it becomes an exciting journey.

The importance of making a decision

Dan highlighted something crucial: with cohabitation, there's often not been a decision. There have been lots of little steps - "I like you, come back to mine, stay over, oh my toothpaste is with you" - and suddenly you're together, maybe with kids, but you've never looked at each other and said, "If we started this again, would I be with you? Would this decision be for life?"

When you come to Christ, it might be time to make a decision about your relationship with others. Not necessarily to break things, but to say, "This happened, but now let's take it forward into something more."

How does upbringing affect our view of marriage?

Dan shared that he had a really good upbringing with a stable marriage around him. His dad was a pastor, and he didn't even know anyone who'd been divorced for ages. He never thought it would happen to people he knew.

Recently, he had to have tricky conversations with his kids because they've seen marriages around them that aren't working. He told them, "Marriages don't just fail. Something's got to happen for it to fail, and something's got to happen for it to succeed." He wanted to pass on that understanding so they wouldn't just rely on what they saw around them.

Matt connected this to the parable of the sower, where the deceitfulness of riches and the cares of this world come in and choke the word. Both are growing together, and eventually the weeds will overcome them. That's a process. There's a process to successful marriages and a process to marriages that fail - it's not instant.

Sharon added that when she first came to Liverpool at 24, she saw a couple roughly her age who'd been married a year and still looked like they liked each other. She was absolutely shocked. She hadn't realised that her expectation of marriage was that you found someone, fell in love, got married, and then gradually hated each other more each year.

That year, God highlighted how much broken thinking had crept into her heart without her even knowing it.

Advice for younger people considering marriage

Matt shared something important for younger people: recently, there's been a spate of couples getting divorced or separating who probably shouldn't have got married in the first place. At the start of their relationship, neither had the courage to break it off due to the belief that, as Christians, dating for more than six months likely meant getting married.

He and Sharon decided to get married within five months, so he did the exact opposite - but they knew. Marriage is a covenant; it's lifelong, and in Christian circles, there can be pressure to get married young if you date for a while.

Be aware of that pressure. Sometimes the hardest thing you can do is break off a relationship if it's not right before God. Your 40-year-old self will thank you for having the courage to end it if needed.

But once you're in, you're in - you make that marriage work.

That said, scripture does talk about grounds for divorce - the three A's: abuse, adultery, and abandonment. These don't instantly create divorce, but there are scriptural grounds to discuss it with God.

Communication is crucial

Sharon highlighted a pattern she's seen in marriages that struggle: people not communicating issues. Maybe they're upset by their spouse but keep it to themselves, don't resolve it, hold onto unforgiveness, and then everything gets seen in that light until it becomes massive.

God can overcome any issue if we're willing to be honest, put our problems on the table, repent of our own shortcomings, and forgive the other person.

What helps a Christian marriage thrive?

Forgiveness would be the obvious answer. Quite early on, Matt and Sharon read "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" - not particularly a Christian book, but it has useful stuff. The concept was that men and women speak different languages.

The most useful page was a table showing: "This is what a woman says, this is what a woman means, and this is what a man hears" - all different. Same the other way around.

They would often do this thing where Sharon would say something, and Matt would go quiet. She'd look at him and ask, "Are you translating right now?" Because he was trying to take what he heard and think, "This is actually what she meant, which is different to what I heard."

When you walk in that attitude of forgiveness, believing your partner has your highest best at heart, even if they didn't communicate it well in that instance, it really helps.

Sharon remembers taking herself off before difficult conversations to think, "This is how I'm feeling - how can I communicate this in a way he's actually going to understand?" It took a lot of practice to communicate in ways they could understand each other without getting defensive.

Dan added that being able to communicate well isn't just relevant to marriage - it's relevant to any relationship because all of us come from different places and think differently. The scope for miscommunication is huge, so we need to work on it.

Marriage isn't just a challenge - it's amazing

Dan pointed out that marriage can be seen as a challenge that has to be overcome because it involves two different types of people. On some levels, it is, but it's also amazing because he can do things Lisa can't, and Lisa can do things he can't. Together they can do things they couldn't do on their own.

Yes, there are challenging times, but when Paul said "I've got a thorn in my flesh," he wasn't referring to his wife.

When you look back at the dawn of time, God said it's not good for man to be alone. Everything was good - this was paradise - and God went, "I can take this up a notch. I'm going to give you a wife."

That's the understanding: life can be good, and if God calls you to singleness, that's perfect. But if he calls you into marriage, that's going to take you from good to very good. Especially for men, it's not good that men are alone. Men spending time on their own for long periods, 98% of the time, it's not good.

If you are doing that, spending all your time on computer games by yourself, you need to get out into community. Even if you're not dating or married, just be with people because it's not good for men to be alone.

Dan added that marriage and being different, often having kids with different roles, it spills over into life. It's equipped him better to deal with people at work and with customers, as they're different from him. He's learned to convey things properly through marriage and those situations. It's not standalone.

The deeper spiritual truth of marriage

Sharon pointed to Ephesians 5:31-32, where Paul quotes back to Genesis about marriage but then says, "This is referring to the mystery of Christ and the church."

The Bible opens with the marriage of Adam and Eve and finishes talking about the marriage between Jesus and his bride, the church. It's got marriage all through it. Part of the reason for marriage is as a reflection of this relationship between Jesus and his church - that whole mutually serving each other, that commitment for life, that laying down your life for each other.

Marriage, being an image of something higher - pointing to a deeper spiritual truth and calling - makes a massive difference.

Marriage Isn't Outdated - It's Timeless

The question isn't whether marriage is outdated or whether it's worth saving. The question is: are we ready to discover what it was always meant to be?

In marriage, there's no room for porn because that breaks the covenant. We keep short accounts with our spouses. We know our roles, our purpose, and our drive is to honour Christ and build his kingdom together.

Research even tells us that if you're married, you're literally going to live longer and healthier lives. But that change starts with understanding marriage isn't just about you or another person. It's about reflecting the eternal love between Christ and his church to a world that's maybe forgotten what real love looks like.

Marriage is not outdated. It's timeless. The problem isn't the institution - it's that we've forgotten what it actually is. When marriage becomes a covenant and not a contract, everything changes.