A newspaper cartoon showed a mother reading a bedtime story to her little curly-haired daughter. The book was called Grim Reality Fairy Tales. The text in the cartoon offered this modern real-world scary story: And the prince kissed her and they fell in love, dated a while and moved in together, broke up, got back together, got married, got a baby, got separated, got back together again, broke up, got divorced, spent time alone rediscovering themselves, met someone new, fell in love and repeated the pattern habitually ever after."

A sad grim outlook and sadly real. It is hopeless, and far from what God intended. More than ever, our children wonder what marriage is and what they might hope for in a relationship.