Marriage - You're Doing It Wrong!

Every once in a while - okay, most of the time - I encounter a blogger who has so many more wise and interesting things to say than I could. This is one of those times. Jennifer Fulwiler at National Catholic Register makes a plea to her readers not to read Khalil Gibran's well-known poem, On Marriage, on their wedding day. She summarizes the very sad and destructive approach to marriage prescribed by the poem:

1. Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
2. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
3. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
4. Stand together yet not too near together.

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Fulwiler has a more fitting title for the list above: How to Have a Difficult Marriage.

How to Fail at Marriage could work, too.

Using the Via Negativa tradition, if you want to understand love, romance, and marriage, sometimes it's good to know what they are not. That is the only purpose that Khalil Gibran's On Marriage serves for the married and marriage hopefuls such as myself. The only useful thing it tells us is what marriage is not. The 'advice' listed should be seen as red flags - if our thoughts start to mirror the ideas of the poem, we should know at once that something is wrong. And fix it. FAST.

We can do better than what this sad, modern culture offers us. So let's.