“For a person is the single most limitless entity in creation, and if there is anything that is even more unlimited and unrestrained in its possibilities than is a person, it is two people together.
Not everyone is as fond of solitude as I have been. And certainly not everyone has seriously entertained the notion of entering the cloister, only to find himself falling in love and getting married instead. But that is how marriage came to me. And marriage comes to everyone, I think, with something of the same surprise, the same reversal of fortunes, the same searching exposure of deep-seated conflict. Not only that, but whatever a person’s temperament or circumstances might be, it seems to me that the conflict which marriage uncovers is always essentially the same one: it is always some version of this tension between the needs for dependence and for independence, between the urge toward loving cooperation and the opposite urge toward detachment, privacy, self-sufficiency. Even to people who have dreamed for years about getting married and who think of themselves as hating to be alone, marriage still cannot help but come as an invasion of privacy. No one has ever been married without being surprised, and usually alarmed, at the sheer intensity of this invasion.” (The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle by Mike Mason, pp. 20-21).
How do you describe the tension found in your marriage/relationships between freedom/self-sufficiency and belonging/dependence…in your own words?
