The Bible advises, unenthusiastically, that
“It is better to marry than to burn.”
Marriage, it has been said, is reaching into a bag of snakes and hoping
you grab an eel. “Needles and pins,
needle and pins, when a man marries his trouble beings,” and for the half of
the marriages that fail, that surely must be true. “Love is a folly of the mind, an unquenchable
fire a hunger without surfeit,” wrote Richard de Fournival
in the 13th century, “a sweet delight, a pleasing madness, a labor
without repose and a repose without labor.” But after the marriage, the living begins—the
hard work of finding a common round between two independent people. Marriage is a learned skill. While it is a natural relationship, it is not
a natural condition. Nothing outside of
the nuclear family provides the warmth, security, and guarantee of permanence
that makes for mental health. It takes
work, and if you find yourself falling out of love, take
the effort to fall back into love again.
It is good advice to “never get married until you have kissed the
Blarney Stone,” and daily affirmation of your wife and children can go along
way in making the remainder of your life pleasant. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a
gallon of gall,” goes another wise folk saying.
Marriage is no place for candor, and words said in anger will linger
above your heads long after you have forgotten why you argued.