Around the year 200, the pretty severe theologian Tertullian wrote glowingly of marriage to his wife:

How shall we ever be able adequately to describe the happiness of that marriage which the Church arranges, the Sacrifice [of the Eucharist] strengthens, upon which the blessing set a seal, at which the angels are present as witnesses, and to which the Father give His consent.

In the seventeenth century, St. Francis de Sales added a practical note based on long pastoral experience:

The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other; it is a perpetual exercise of mortification.

The Christian vision of marriage, sanctified by Christ who performed his first miracle at a wedding, is unique in the world and so it is threatened by the assumptions of much of that same world. A Cardinal Archbishop of a European city expressed to me surprise at the comparative vitality of marriage in our country. In his land, marriage is increasingly rare, and the majority of couples seek no blessing in the Church. We are heading along the same track, with nonchalant divorce and attempts to redefine marriage as other than the bond between a man and a woman. The chaos after Hurricane Katrina was in part due to the breakdown of marriage in New Orleans, where nearly three-quarters of the children have no father. [...] Even well-intentioned young people are easily confused by the wrong assumptions about marriage they absorb in an unstable culture. One of those misunderstandings is that cohabitation has no moral consequences.