When people marry and the priest or officer says, "til death do you part", do the married couples realize that when they die that they won't be together in Heaven (or Hell)?

The phrase represents the common Christian belief that there is no marriage in the Kingdom of Heaven because marriage is an earthly practice. See Matthew 22: 23–33 for details.

@SavoirFaire got it right.

Isn’t that expression a tacit incentive for one to kill the other if things aren’t working out?

If they’re tied into an unhappy marriage – and because of this vow, they cannot divorce – this phrase would appear to grant permission for one spouse to kill the other.

@elbanditoroso your post made me think of this song . Thanks for the bit of nostalgia :P

Nope, no way together for eternity. For some people marriage in and of itself is an eternity.

And why impose that burden on the person who surveys the other? Your spouse dies in a car crash after two years of marriage and you can’t remarry? Nope.

@zenvelo “For some people marriage in and of itself is an eternity.”

So now I’m praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
‘Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don’t think that I can really survive
I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow
But God only knows what I can do right now
I’m praying for the end of time
So I can end my time with you

Marrying another Christian means we’ll be together in Heaven with family, etc…

If death didn’t end a marriage, no widow or widower would be able to remarry within the constraints of a religion that requires monogamy.

They won’t be together anywhere, unless they are laid to rest in the same grave and are consumed by the earth in unison. lol
I’m an ex mormon…LDS believe in marriages surviving into the nether kingdoms. Pffft. What kind of insanity is this. haha

“Nether,” @Coloma? “Nether” means “lower.” Are you speaking of the infernal realm or something else?

@Jeruba haha…good catch, duly noted. LDS believe in 3 kingdoms in the after life. The belestial ( lowest ) the “terrestrial” (middle) and the Celestial..(highest) heaven. They believe you can “work” your way up in the after life. Pffft!

I don’t know… I didn’t have a Christian wedding. No priest and no “till death do us part”.

The Baha’i vows are clear and simple: “We will all, verily, abide by the Will of God.” That sums it up perfectly for me. We do believe, though, that we will be together through all the Worlds of God… whatever they are.

Mormons understand that. They get married for life and can get sealed for eternity. I knew a guy who was divorced from his first wife but sealed to her for eternity. Poor bastard! But I think they ( the ones who marry until death) know what that “until death do you part” part is. Have never seen any of them balk because of it.

Tell that to the so-called “ministers” in the fundamentalist sect I was raised in. You married someone, you married them not only for life here, but for life in the hereafter as well. I wonder if that means I’m going to have to put up with my ex, the Wicked Witch of the East, throughout eternity even though we’ve been divorced since 1976. What a horrible thought!!!!!!!!

@uberbatman GAH! That’s the worst earworm of all time!

I have a long and tumultuous history with “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The first time I ever heard it was stuck in some especially terrible rush hour traffic on the way to work, hopelessly late and with no way out. The only thing on the air is this fratty, sophomoric talk show host who laughs like a donkey, and the local classic rock station. I was hung over as all get out and moving about two feet every ten minutes, and the only choices were silence (and the pounding in my own head), the braying donkey idiot and his even stupider guest talking about celebrity side boobs, or… this.

So I’m listening to it, and kind of distractedly bopping my head along. The song sort of sneaks up on you, how terrible it is. By the time you get to “Let me sleep awwwwwnnn ayyyyyt, baybeh baybeh,” it’s too late. The song is firmly lodged in the metaphorical rectum of your brain. I turned the radio off and the voices persisted. Boy, did they persist. My skull had turned into a madman’s echo chamber. By the end, I was actively rooting for them to drive the car off a cliff, or into a lake, or something. The fact that they hate each other by the end of the song is a small consolation.

Years later I was ranting about this song to my dad and he said, offhand, “oh, your mom and I used to listen to that in the car when we were in college. It was our song.” It’s a song about two idiots having sex in a car. I was born right after they dropped out of college. FML.

Nowadays, we listen to the local classic rock station all day, every day at my workplace. People used to have a say in the music, but it literally resulted in a physical fight between two employees a couple years ago, and it’s been this station ever since. So now we have 70’s themed musical totalitarianism. Only, some chucklehead over there really likes Meatloaf, and they play this shit about ten times a day. Meanwhile, there are many genuinely awesome songs like Moondance, Witchy Woman, Voodoo Child, or Nights in White Satin, which are in the rotation… about once a year.

I would bang my head on the keyboard a couple times and put myself out of this misery. Only, I’m pretty sure there’s a soundtrack in hell…

@Coloma The three kingdoms of glory that the LDS believe in are the Celestial Kingdom, Terrestrial Kingdom, and Telestial Kingdom. They don’t believe you can “work” your way up in the after life either, though maybe I’m not 100% clear on what you mean. They do believe that those in the Celestial Kingdom will continue to progress, but any more details than that are pretty fuzzy.

@kritiper Eternal marriage doesn’t work like that. If you are sealed to someone who you don’t want to be married to anymore, you won’t be married to that person forever in the eternities. It’s also possible to have a sealing annulled (cancelled).

@TheRealOldHippie: So, then, what did they say about Matthew 22:23–30?

@Haleth Ahahah that’s great. Incidentally enough, when my mom remarried my mom and all the bridesmaids sung all the female part and her husband and the groomsmen sang the male parts of this song at their reception. At the time I found it a really odd song to sing at a wedding. Low and behold ~6 years later they divorced :P

@KNOWITALL But what about the verse @SavoirFaire mentioned? If the Bible says there is no marriage in Heaven, why would Christians think they get to be with their families? That verse seems pretty clear to me. If they’ll be like angels, I’d think they’d be there to serve God, not to live forever with the family they created on Earth.

@Aqua _ He didn’t mention that. Maybe he wanted to give her hell for all eternity. Get backs are a bitch!

@Jeruba – Damned if I know because I have no idea what it says. I’m not into reading fairy tales.

@Aqua It’s been a long time for me but close enough, my understanding at the time ( I was still a child/ young teen ) was that marriages were sealed in the Celestial kingdom but that one could work their way up from the lower realms, I don’t know, and I don’t care. haha
It’s all sci-fi if you ask me.

If people allow those words in their ceremony, well, its their life, right? Let them have their fantasies that death exists, that there is a heaven & a hell, or that they actually understand love enough to not be one of the 50% of all married couples that get divorced.

Vows are the least of anyone’s worries.