Long ago, back in 2014, well before all the current craziness that dominates the headlines, actor Matthew McConaughey spoke to GQ magazine about his marriage to the woman who had been his longtime girlfriend, Camila Alves, and how his faith in Christ and relationship with his pastor led to him deciding to tie the knot.
As background, McConaughey and Alves began dating in 2006, then remained just “dating” until they were married in June of 2012, after they had two kids together. It was faith and studying Christianity that led the two to get married in 2012, McConaughey told GQ in 2014.
He spoke on the matter as part of a much larger, more general interview about his life and career. At one point well into the interview, he was asked about why he and Alves finally got married after having children together while dating. “After already having children with Camila, why did you decide to get married?” the interviewer asked.
Replying, he first said, “I had to get to the point where I saw it as more than just the thing to do. I wanted to really want to. You know, I didn’t want it to be a destination; the fun is that we’re on the adventure together. So I spent a lot of time with her.”
Continuing, he then got into the spiritual aspect of deciding to get married, telling GQ, “We talked about it spiritually. We did a lot of reading and talked to a lot of people that had been divorced, a lot of people that had been happily married. We talked to our pastor. In the end, our understanding was, Let’s go make a covenant, with you, me, and God. And let’s understand that this is not a destination, this is the beginning of an adventure that we’re taking together.”
Adding to how realizing the religious importance of what he was doing helped him “click” and his attitude about it change, McConaughey said, “Once that clicked with me and I didn’t have to intellectualize my way into it, I started to feel the excitement. I was having my own definition of the freedom I wanted thrown right back at me, in possibly a much greater way.”
Even back in 2014, McConaughey had spoken about God and his relationship with Him before. For example, when accepting an Oscar for Interstellar, he said, “First off, I want to thank God, because that’s who I look up to. He has graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or of any other human hand. He has shown me that… It’s a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late Charlie Laughton who said, ‘When you’ve got God you’ve got a friend- and that friend is you.‘”
Featured image credit: By All-Pro Reels from District of Columbia, USA – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97724492