爱华网
系列专题：《点亮生活的智慧：人生之钥》
Good-bye intimacy. Hello loneliness. In the days when marriage was the only accepted arrangement for living together – or even sharing a bed –you went to the altar without asking why. (Unless, that is, a baby was on the way.) 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.”
