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to mystic institute.org. So let's begin. In his catechetical work on the articles of faith,

Thomas Aquinas writes, marriage, matrimony has a threefold good. The first is the birth of children and educating them to the worship of God.

The second is that fidelity in which one must render to another. And the third is that it is a sacrament,

or in other words, the indivisibility of matrimony, which shows forth the indivisible union of Christ

and his church. So we might more succinctly say that marriage has three goods, a procreative

good, a unitive good, and a sacramental good. And so tonight I want to talk first about Thomas Aquinas' understanding of friendship

and how it shapes his view of the unitive good of marriage.

And then we'll discuss the procreative good, i.e. being fathers and mothers.

And along the way, we can touch on the sacramental good of marriage.

And if people want to talk more about that later, I'm happy to do that as well. And I'll then conclude with some practical steps that you can take now to prepare for marriage and children in the future if that is something that you're interested in.

So part one, marriage and friendship.

Now, it's common, as you saw in the title.

It's very common to the point of cliche to hear engaged couples or people who've just gotten married

talk about how excited they are to marry their best friend.

Right? And other people say, well, we don't really want to talk too much about marrying your best friend, right? You want to

make sure you have friendships outside of marriage. You can't put a lot of, you know, you can't have

the burden of being a best friend and a spouse on the shoulder of one poor person. Or they say, well, you know, there's no such

thing as a soulmate, there's no such thing as that only one person that you could have married.

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