Commitment, Trust and Sacrifice
The essential ingredients of real marriage
I’m going to start my contribution to the Panopticon debate with something Penguin said in their original piece:
The chances of an average human being picking the one person (soulmate) to meet their psychological, sexual, social, physical and emotional needs in the first thirty years of life are infinitesimally small.
Whilst I understand what Penguin is trying to say here, I can’t agree with their conclusion that marriages made that early in adult life are doomed to failure.
Having grown up in a small community at a time when few people had the opportunity to socialise with individuals elsewhere, I can attest that most of the people I knew, there and then, married someone they had known since childhood.
The majority of those marriages survived. Mine has lasted 60 years and is still going strong. She was 18, and I not quite 22, when we tied the knot. By then we had known for almost two years that we were a perfect match.
Self reliance, not reliance on another
Truth to tell, Penguin, in their assertion, is setting the bar way too high. Indeed, I would argue that any relationship in which either party relies on the other to satisfy all of those…