Understanding and Sympathy Are the Foundation of Lasting Love and Marriage
Vasiliev, who wrote Theory of Love, concluded through extensive data research that the passion arising from sexual desire between a man and a woman can last at most twenty-five months. That is, once two people are together for more than two years, they no longer rely on passion but on something else to sustain them. The pessimistic philosophical master Schopenhauer, recognizing this, was very unwilling to be bound by marriage; he believed that sacrificing a lifetime of freedom and happiness for a brief passion was simply the most foolish choice, and so he remained single.
Those of us living in the mundane world all long for a love that cuts to the bone, and a marriage built on such love that lasts until old age, but such perfect love and marriage are rarely seen in the human world. For, according to Havelock Ellis, the ideal love and marriage between the sexes is built on the foundation of partners being able to understand and sympathize with each other—what the Chinese ancients called a "soulmate" and a "female confidante." But meeting a soulmate through the mountain-and-stream rapport may be a fortune one cannot encounter in a lifetime.
From a sociological point of view, once two people contract a marriage, form a family, and raise children, it is no longer purely a love relationship; it also involves the question of bilateral (patrilineal and matrilineal) upbringing. Human society, to maintain its stability, attaches special importance to marriage. Whatever the nationality or culture, when contracting a marriage people take it with great seriousness, and the wedding is made as grand as possible; all relatives and friends who can witness come to witness it. The reason for all this is chiefly to consolidate the foundation of the marriage.
Marriage is a long-term companionship and cooperative relationship in which both spouses assume responsibility for each other, fulfill obligations, and give each other the solace of love. Marriage is, so far, the long-term cohabitation model between man and woman based on sexual relations that human society has found most suitable, and this model more or less goes against the laws of nature.
As Havelock Ellis put it: "Every man or woman, in the basic and central affection, however inclined to monogamy, may more or less develop some sexually tinged feeling toward someone of the opposite sex outside the marriage. We formerly did not readily admit this fact, but today our attitude toward it is already far more frank."
The fact Ellis points out is a human nature that all human society strives to contain, for "if sexual love were allowed to move freely in the world, especially within a social structure with strict status rules, the power with which it would disrupt the whole society would surely be very great" (Fei Xiaotong).
The reason the divorce rate in modern society is so high has, of course, the cause of major changes in social structure, and also the cause of the lengthening of human lifespan. In the past, a couple could on average accompany each other only two or three decades, but today a couple may accompany each other for as long as fifty years or more. This poses a new challenge to humanity's ability to sustain love and marriage, but it is not to say that faithful and happy love and marriage do not exist in human society; it is only that, to be honest, ideal love and marriage are rarely seen.
Mr. Fei Xiaotong believed that those who can best understand and sympathize with each other are close kin. That is, the close-kin marriage extolled by the Chinese ancients, in which closeness is added to closeness, is actually the marriage most suited to long-term development. For among close kin, the environment of upbringing and education is closest, and the life outlook, values, and worldviews of the two sexes most easily coincide to a high degree. But today such marriage both violates the laws of nature and violates public order and good customs, and is no longer worth promoting.
Most of our marriages today are built on the foundation of free love, but, influenced by Chinese traditional culture, our free love still mostly has some problems of traditional moral束缚. Our culture strongly opposes the behavior of starting wantonly and abandoning in the end; thus, once a man and woman establish a love relationship and have sexual relations, regardless of whether the other is truly a suitable marriage partner, under the pressure of custom they will walk to the wedding hall. Thus many people discover after marriage that the impulse of their love stage will finally evolve into long endurance after marriage.
This produces the scene Mr. Qian Zhongshu described in Fortress Besieged: marriage is like a besieged fortress—those outside want to get in, those inside want to get out. It also gave rise to another classic saying: marriage is the grave of love.
I feel that our generation of Chinese thinkers has a duty to untie this knot for our descendants. We should encourage our descendants to learn love in love, and encourage them to experience several love affairs before considering marriage. Or, at the very least, incorporate marriage-and-love education into our educational system, telling them how to find partners who can understand and sympathize with each other.
Many of us need to enter the marriage-and-love classroom to learn how to marry and love. China's divorce rate now exceeds one-third, and another roughly one-third or more of couples, though not divorced, actually endure each other rather than appreciate each other in order to maintain various social relationships. Such a life is a tragedy. The quality of many people's marriages needs to be raised; many couples need to learn in the marriage-and-love classroom how to understand and sympathize with their spouse, and how to find a balance between respecting the spouse's independence and maintaining the cooperative relationship of husband and wife.
If one blindly demands that the other sacrifice his or her own life choices for oneself, such love obviously cannot last. But how many couples in the world are not doing this foolish thing? We always demand the other according to our own life standards, always hope the other will help us realize our own life wishes, but rarely think that the other also has his or her own life wishes.
We long demand that our spouse understand and sympathize with us, but rarely think of understanding and sympathizing with them. This has produced countless marriages in the world whose quality is so low as to be despairing. Once I was walking in a park; three women were chatting nearby, and one was pouring out her heart to another. She told the other woman that she had said to her husband: "My demands on you are not high; I only want you to do such-and-such." These words grated on my ears. Why do we always dare to demand, with perfect self-righteousness, that our spouse live according to our requirements and treat life according to our views? I always feel that in our country, much love is no longer love but a kind of enslavement.
Such enslavement may have existed since ancient times. Thus more than two thousand years ago, the Buddha said to his disciples: "People are bound by wives, children, fields, and dwellings even more heavily than by prison. Prison has an end, but wives and children (here 'wives and children' means wife and children together) have no thought of leaving." The Buddha had been married and had children, and finally chose to shave his head and leave home, uttering such a sigh, regarding family and marriage as life imprisonment. I think the Buddha must have suffered deeply from enslavement in marriage to be able to say such incisive words.
I do not say this to advocate that we all leave home to escape reality, but to point out a fact: the low quality of human marriage has much to do with family members enslaving each other. If husband and wife understand and sympathize with each other, and turn this mutual enslavement into mutual support and appreciation, the quality of marriage will be greatly raised. I ask: of such love and marriage, how many people would be willing to cast them away? Those who abandon their homes and children must do so only because the home has become like a life-imprisonment prison, suffocating and unbearable. Rather than stay in such a home, a shot to the head would be quicker.