Or else you looked to marital status for the benefits it would bring: personally, socially, materially. For anybody weak or insecure, matrimony offered a safe haven: a brand new identity supplied by the spouse.
It goes without saying that such married couples did not always live happily ever after. No one could be sure of the partner’s motives. In a conflict either could say: “I married you for all the wrong reasons. Not because I loved you. Not of my own free will.”
Nowadays, with no more pressure from society and little in way of incentives, you may well ask: Why should anyone want to get married
I can’t think of a single good reason… Except, possibly, a simple wish to show the world where you belong… visions of a future bleak without the other… a genuine desire to be there for the one you love, dedicating your life to his or her welfare.
For marriages entered into on these grounds auguries couldn’t be better. But, my goodness, it takes courage. For any couple who have found it, I take off my hat and say: Congratulations!
As a student in London, I shared a flat with a Moslem girl. Her mother, still young, came to visit, covered in black from head to toe: her eyes were all I ever saw of her. Proudly she told me of a solemn vow made to her husband on his deathbed twelve years before: that no man would ever see her beautiful face again.
Equally faithful is a Western woman I know, who spends her life surrounded by photographs and mementoes of a long dead husband, mourning him as fervently as once she loved him, impervious to the approaches of any other man.
Another widow with a young family remarried a man who won’t hear his predecessor’s name mentioned. Anything that belonged to him has been dispensed with. To the children he says: “That man is dead and gone. I’m your father now.”
And then there was the Connemara workman, chatting away whilst plastering my kitchen. Having mentioned in passing that his wife had been left widowed with two little boys, he made the odd friendly reference to Jimmy, their dad.
“You knew him ” I asked. He shook his head. “We never met. But I have a feeling he’s still with us, somehow, looking down from afar.” Then, smiling, he went on: “And I say to him, don’t you worry, ’m here. I’m looking after them for you.”
I looked on, impressed, as he bent to refill his trowel.
“She fell out of love with me,” sighs a man, apparently accepting this as a regrettable but perfectly valid reason for his partner in life to have abandoned him. As if ‘being in love’, an emotional state as volatile as any mood, were a prerequisite to staying loyal.
“He replaced me with a younger model,” sniffs a middle-aged wife, fighting off bitter memories of the passion experienced early on in her marriage, before the friction and trivia of everyday life wore it all away, revealing nothing but a vacuum underneath.
The person who has no explanation to offer is one who had settled for a safe, rational union based on mental affinity and mutual interests, but came to see the other half suddenly, inconceivably, after years of congenial living, make a bid for freedom.
It seems that neither emotions, physical attraction nor common sense can be depended upon to keep a couple together. So what does it take for two people to maintain a life-long devotion Is it love ? undying love Is there such a thing Or is that love a function of something else
At the end of the day, it may all come down to values. A relationship is only as sound, and as lasting, as the values shared by the two individuals involved.
