“Marriage is socialism among two people.”
Barbara Ehrenreich
I want to say a word or two on marriage today, and I want to start with Henrik Ibsen who says that marriage is something that should be built on full confidence, on complete and unqualified frankness from both sides. Couples are not to keep anything back; in marriage, there is no deception, it is an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of everything.
I thought that was beautiful, but unfortunately, it is mostly so only in words because this is something that we seldom see happening in marriages. Nietzsche also contributed to our topic for the day by saying that the best friend is likely to acquire the best wife because a good marriage is based on mutual friendship. Heartbreakingly, many also fail in this endeavour.
Catharine Beecher noted further that we only need to think of the many young hearts who have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine as the highest earthly felicity was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, often leading to suffering. It should be kept in mind, however, that it is not the chains that hold a marriage together but the hundreds of tiny threads sewing people together through years of highs and lows. Simone Signoret says that it is this that makes a marriage last. I think that if couples put as much time and effort in planning their marriages than they do in planning their weddings, then they will be one step ahead of many others.
Here is my plea – reassess the relationship you have with your husband or wife and if it requires of you to rekindle the fire, then do so. I want to end today’s meditation with the epitaph on the gravestone of the poet Robert Frost and his wife Elinor:
Two such as you with such a master speed
cannot be parted nor be swept away
from one another once you are agreed
that life is only life forevermore
together wing to wing and oar to oar.
Comments
Post a Comment