A married couple who stays passionately in love is indeed fortunate and has the best of all worlds. But those are the minority (according to some research, less than 10% of cases). There are marriages in which there is neither passionate love nor companion love and the two people suffer a lot while being with each other. For these people, there is no doubt that they should not continue being together while mentally torturing each other. Life is too short to allow such kind of living. The dilemma is more profound for couples who are, on one hand, not madly in love with their partners but who, on the other hand, are having a reasonably comfortable life together. Given that the odds of passionately loving each other for a long time are low, there are several available alternatives: (a) keep searching for passionate love and not get or stay married without it, (b) settle from the beginning for companion love with some traces of passionate love as well, or (c) completely separate the two and have passionate affairs to compensate for the lack of passion in the relationships. There can also be some combinations of these alternatives. In all the above alternatives there is some kind of compromise, and the question is which of them is the least painful. Choice (a), above, emphasizes the Romantic Ideology which assumes that “there is no mountain high enough and no ocean deep enough” to stop our love, and there is nothing “our love couldn’t rise above.” In opposition to this ideology external circumstances play a role in our life and should be taken into consideration, especially in light of the risk of the disappearance of passionate love. Indeed, many people in many traditions assume that raising children (and not love) should be the primary factor underlying a successful marriage. Passionate love may also be absent in arranged marriages when the two do not know each other before the marriage. Giving up passionate love altogether is giving up the sweetness of life. In contrast, completely disregarding reality is also not wise, as after all we do live with day-to-day realities. By Professor of Philosophy Aaron Ben-Zeév http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-name-love/201105/i-married-because-external-circumstances
It’s true that nothing in this world
makes us so necessary to others
as the affection we have for them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
