{"id":11122,"date":"2010-11-16T15:44:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T15:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/11\/16\/thoughts-on-marriage\/"},"modified":"2010-11-16T15:44:35","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T15:44:35","slug":"thoughts-on-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/11\/16\/thoughts-on-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager and Michael Medved are my favorite AM band talk jocks. Both intelligent and wise, they raise the level of the general culture unlike toxin-merchants such as Howard Stern who lower it. He's no star in my firmament. Prager and Medved know that they have a moral obligation not to add to the cultural pollution. And they have the intellect and good sense to make a positive contribution. Intellect is important, but wisdom and good judgment are even more important.  Rare commodities these, not to be found on the Left with its adolescent querulousness, snarkiness, and the mindless incantation of the SIXHIRB litany:  sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. (That particular list from Prager.)<\/span><\/p>\n

But my topic is marriage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prager a while back cited respect and liking as two of the factors most important for a successful marriage. He placed love much lower on the list. Prager's remark struck me as astute. Do you like this person? Can you put up with her morning and night through good times and bad? Do you respect this person? These are important questions to ask before doing something rash. The nature of her endowments fore and aft will no doubt come into consideration, and ought to. But leave that for later in the logical, if not the temporal, order of considerations. A wise man knows which of his heads is for thinking, and which for linking. He thinks with the big one.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brain, heart, penis\/vagina, in that (logical) order. I trust my meaning is clear.<\/span><\/p>\n

It helps if one can admire one's partner for attributes and skills one does not possess oneself. Marriage is a quest for completion, for the other half with which to make a whole, to cop a riff from Plato's <\/span>Symposium.<\/em> In a good marriage, the partners do not compete<\/em> with one another, they complete<\/em> one another. One does well to consider whether it is wise to marry someone in the same line of work. Would I want to be married to a female equivalent of myself? I need completion, not duplication.  One of me is enough.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nietzsche somewhere says that marriage is a long conversation.  But how would he know?  Marriage is better described as a long wordless understanding.  It's deeper than words.  In any case you will be talked out soon enough.  So there had better be something deeper for the relation to rest upon.<\/span><\/p>\n

There must be both sameness and difference. Sameness for compatibility, difference for complementarity. But here is the hard part: the ways in which the partners are similar must be conducive to their getting along, and the ways in which they are different must also be conducive to their getting along.<\/span><\/p>\n

Example. Don't marry someone with different views about money. If you are frugal, you would be insane to marry a person who thinks of Nirvana as a charge card with an unlimited line of credit. But if you are sharp about money, you may want to think twice about marrying someone who is also sharp about it, for you may come into conflict on how best to save and invest, spend and lend. The sameness and the difference must be balanced. The partners need to have the same general view about money, but one of the partners should keep the books, leaving the other to perform tasks more suitable for him or her. There will of course be exceptions to this rule of thumb.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager and Michael Medved are my favorite AM band talk jocks. Both intelligent and wise, they raise the level of the general culture unlike toxin-merchants such as Howard Stern who lower it. He's no star in my firmament. Prager and Medved know that they have a moral obligation not to add to the cultural pollution. … Continue reading “Thoughts on Marriage”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marriage","category-sex-love-lust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}