As I've said on here before, people change.
The person you might fall in love with at 18, may not be the person you would fall in love with at 25. So what do you do if you have already married that person?
And what about if you really believe that you can live with someone for ever, but find that you just cannot spend time together without driving each other mad?
These things happen.
They might even lead to emotional or physical cruelty.
I know at least three people who got married, where their friends thought that they were making a mistake I was not surprised that those marriages broke down. All three have happily remarried and had children. Divorce was the right thing for them. Why live a life of misery, when the right person may be round the corner. They didn't deliberately marry the wrong person first time round.
I do think, though, that where there is real love, the marriage should be worked at, and couselling obtained, to try to sort out any problems.
And I think that marriage has always been as much about politics and finance as about love and 'sacredness'.
I was watching 'Who Do you Think You are?' last night and something was said that reminded me of this thread.
It was about Julia Sawalha's ancestry. She was talking to her father about his parents. Remembering an incident from her childhood, she asked if Grandfather had loved Grandmother.
Without a moment's thought, her father answered 'no' ~ which seemed to shock her. He said that in the East ~ the family was Bedouin from Jordan ~ they do not have a Western idea of love. What one might call love, there, was based on respect and knowing someone well for a long time, resulting in closeness. The Western idea of romantic love, he said, was regarded as a nonsense.
I think that this type of marriage was and is common in many societies ~ including in the West; past and present, depending upon the culture.
Finding love, of course, is another matter.
I believe in marrying for love, but not eveyone in every society does.
I believe that you can love one another, without being married.
I believe that there are good reasons to marry, that are not related to love.
