The Secure Bond Marriage Needs Today

In 1949, Ida Friederike Görres wrote, “That which is unnatural … people say, is indissolubility.” She disagreed. By 1971, when she sent her final book, What Binds Marriage Forever (CUA Press, 2026), to the publisher, she saw that this argument was one of the battering rams used by the sexual liberationists pushing for divorce and remarriage with full access to the sacraments—that is, a redefinition of marriage—inside the Church.

To respond, she stepped back to consider what is human. In What Binds Marriage Forever, Görres defends the indissolubility of marriage through reflections on “an anthropological understanding of monogamy.” In doing so, she does more than defend a teaching of the Church; she reveals the deeper truth beneath it.

In 1971, the sexual revolution was advancing like a juggernaut in Germany. Some were pushing hard to extend its reach into the Church. From university departments of theology to diocesan chancellories to Catholic journals, Görres was watching enthusiasts of this juggernaut seize central positions of influence and power within the Church.

What Binds Marriage Forever had a message that the new Synodal Way Catholics in Germany did not want to hear. This book was quickly pushed aside and largely forgotten; it has been out of print in Germany for fifty-five years. Yet, the topics this book addresses are front and center, and Görres’s insights are ones we need today. What Binds Marriage Forever, now available in English (CUA Press, 2026), provides not only a window into the history of the fight over marriage in the Church fifty years ago but also vital insights for today.

Görres opens the book by considering the case presented by a Catholic in 1970 for allowing divorce and remarriage. She could have titled this section of the book: The origins of the bumper sticker “love is love.” The argument is, basically, “love, love, love!”—in which “love” is equated with individual “happiness” and “free, spontaneous choice.” These advocates insist that marriage exists only when two people feel love; and where there is no longer love, there is no longer marriage.

Görres steps back from this “emotional propaganda,” as she calls it, to survey marriage across the millennia in human cultures, applying her anthropological approach. She identifies two poles that define intimate relationships in non-Christian cultures: one is kinship, the other is eros.

Pole #1: Kinship

This is how Görres describes the extended family of kinship:

This requires three groups: the ancestors, the current bearers, and the descendants for whom the “heritage”—tangible as well as spiritual—is guarded and extended. This process is a unity: the handing over, the transmission, and the tradition as an object and as a perpetual act. Since humans are mortal, the actual bridges that keep passing on the legacy beyond the boundary of death are marriages … Marriage does not create a family; instead, it continues one.

She observes the strange contradiction that those rallying for “progress” are the same ones pushing for disassociating sex with fertility: “The relationship to the future on which everything is based is eminently human. It is strange that today’s worshipers of the future have become so oddly blind to this.”

However, she observes, prioritizing kinship alone has a built-in instability because, while kinship-based marriage provides constraints on the danger of eros, it can do so to the point of structurally excluding love. Moreover, prioritizing kinship in marriage for the sake of clan and inheritance tends to deny individual consent and fosters a proclivity to allow divorce in the event of infertility. Thus, kinship alone is not sufficient as the basis to define “marriage” as a cornerstone of stability in a civilization and human flourishing.

What Görres means by marriage, the direction toward which it needs to lean if husband and wife are to thrive (or at least not crash and burn), is “its primordial sense, as it was according to the will of the Creator on the morning of creation.”

Pole #2: Eros

The second pole toward which non-Christian notions of the sexual relation of man and woman tend is eros. She observes how enthusiasts of allowing for divorce and remarriage claim marriage is about what they call “love.” Yet, Görres shows that what they usually mean by this is eros, not love. She notes how in literature, eros “includes the typical symbolic references of hunting, hunter, arrow, and trap, as well as fortress and conquest.” This is the very excitement these enthusiasts seek. Yet, “within this framework,” writes Görres, “eros is fundamentally adrift—and thus becomes the most dangerous power.”

Görres dismantles the claim that the “freedom” to switch from partner to partner as passions change is a more “natural” approach to sex. She demonstrates that centering individual independence in pursuit of eros in intimate relationships has always proven antithetical to authentic love. She shows how, from ancient Greek mythology to today, this has been and remains a recipe for instability. And, she observes, “uninhibited selfish sexuality is the very definition of fornication.”

The Mean Between the Extremes: Indissolubility

She concludes that, between these two extremes of eros and kinship as common leitmotifs for marriage in human culture, what the Church teaches about marriage—a mean between these two—is, in fact, the most natural approach.

Indissolubility, argues Görres, allows for the potential for the emergence of love and eros within marriage. “Love,” she writes, “can find its place within fides and sacramentum; it is very much desired. Yet, love is not its root, rather its fruit.” Indissolubility supports extended kinship while safeguarding individual consent to marriage. It also respects the significance of the marriage bond, even when there is unwilled infertility—as she and her husband experienced, with great pain, in their own marriage.

Görres fully recognizes that difficulties within a marriage can abound. Yet indissolubility, instead of being the problem for problematic marriages, is the very structure of stability and support that can allow a marriage to mature. She illustrates this with an analogy:

Like every birth, this beginning initiates a process of becoming. A marriage that is becoming—that has just become a marriage—is a marriage like the way an embryo is a human. The marriage’s undeveloped state gives it as little justification for its destruction as the child’s undeveloped state would be justification for abortion.

“For this commencement,” she explains, “can grow into the miracle of the marital union that coalesces everything together.” She emphasizes that “this seal of unity” in the fidelity of marriage bears witness to God’s own fidelity to us, sin and all. When spouses do not give up on each other, they reflect to the world God’s own unfailing love, which does not give up on us.

As she wrote in 1968 in her essay “Our Image of Christ” in Bread Grows in Winter (Ignatius Press, 2025):

He is the center of their existence; they measure everything they do and do not do by His Word and Will by its effect for His Kingdom . . . I think of the unhappy ones who do not divorce because of this, of the divorced who forego a second marriage to someone newly discovered—staggering testimonies that He is Lord.

The Church’s teaching on marriage allows a way to balance the poles of kinship and eros. Far from being merely a practical yet dry stability, this instead is what facilitates fruitfulness. She explains:

Covenant, law, and grace … are not outside or ancillary to love, nor are they a substitute for it. Rather they are the ground, the enclosure, in which the modes of love I have mentioned and the complement of their natural shortcomings; they and their integration into each other, interior and external support, the dynamism of growth toward maturity. Also, last but not least, and as the most important element, these three are the healing power in the event of impending decay as when a tear occurs.

Görres highlights how the attempt to define the purpose of marriage in terms of individual ”happiness” and “love” understood as a fleeting emotion is a fragile foundation, perpetually vulnerable to the disappointment of one person in the imperfection bound to surface in the other. In her view, the sexual liberationists who want to claim what is “natural” for their side fail. She contrasts this with marriage. Between fickle eros and the strict claims of kinship, the indissoluble bond of marriage stands as the balanced path supporting human flourishing. It is not a harsh restriction, but a secure framework that allows time for maturation, and bears witness to the Love of all loves that never gives up—an institution that befits both human beings and the cosmic order.

In an era that speaks much of the future yet is often dismissive of the unique, vital contribution of marriage and family for the generations yet to come, What Binds Marriage Forever calls us back to the original meaning of marriage as intended from the beginning of creation. Today, as calls within the Church to redefine marriage continue, Görres offers timely clarity. She reminds us that what truly binds marriage forever is not fleeting emotion, but a share in and sign of the Creator’s fidelity.