Dear Editor,

I would like to make a couple of observations regarding the opinion piece by Earl Barrios Jr. “Defining Love and Marriage. – May 7 issue. First, the statistic that over 50 percent of marriages end up in divorce is a bit misleading. The reason this statistic is so high is because some people go through multiple divorces. For example: Let’s say four couples get married. One of those couples gets a divorce. The divorce rate is now 25 percent. Those two get remarried to someone else and divorce again. Now out of a total of six marriages there have been three divorces or 50 percent. The other three, however, have stayed together. Some individuals go through three or four divorces which ups the number. So in reality, many more marriages are successful than statistics would imply.

Secondly, the author can’t seem to define love. He makes a mistake in thinking that love in an uncontrollable emotion. There is a big difference between love and lust. In the Bible, God commands us to love. It is an action that is controllable. In First Corinthians 13, love is described as follows: “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things. Love never fails.” (New King James). Couples who live together with this kind of love will stay together. One of the major problems in marriage today is that people only consider what they will get out of it instead of what they can give to help build up the other person. Therein lies the joy of marriage, each person seeking to make the other person’s life more enjoyable. There is a saying that, “You must learn to give before you are worthy to receive.”

My parents were married 70 years before my father passed away. My wife and I have been married for 45 years and it gets better each year.

Jerry DeYoung,

Oakdale