Marriage is Love's Grave? Is married life a nightmare for men and women?

Love and Marriage: Is Married Life a Nightmare for Men and Women?
Is Marriage the Love's Grave?

We love to dream. We love great things. But we can’t live on dreams and we can’t live always on a high. We are always forced to descend to real life. And romantic love is a good illustration of that.

We love romantic love, but the life span of romantic love is short by nature. And what remains of it, of the lover’s passion, after its ending? What is left over of its initial greatness and enchantment, in the subsequent life of the couple?

Sometimes very little or nothing, just a handful of nothing. Man and woman reveal their profound facets. The illusions and the instincts fly to new illusions, loves, passions. Or there is a fall into disenchantment.

There are many literary regrets, attesting to this cruel falling of romantic love; there are many regrets on the nature of marriage, considering it as love’s grave.

Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.

Samuel Pepys, 1633-1703, English writer, Diary

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914, American writer, The Devil's Dictionary

But there is, of course, another face of the aftermath of romantic love, something that may be as great as the initial forms of love. Married life isn’t necessarily the nightmare mentioned by so many people. The couple’s life can contain dedication, sympathy, shared joy, complicity, respect, refuge, shared memories, help against the cruelty of life... And what is more important, or great, or real?

As Comte-Sponville says:

A couple, when happy (when more or less happy, for happiness is never absolute) is a place of truth, of life shared, of trust, of peaceful and gentle intimacy, reciprocal joys, gratitude, fidelity, generosity, humour, love.

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