What relationship between human beings is the most complex, deep, intense? Passionate love between man and woman is surely a contender. Love besotted men and women regularly surrender fame and fortune, comforts and distinctions, and sometimes even life itself. The tragic passion of Abelard and Heloise nine centuries ago astonishes and moves us still. Such love, it seems, has turned the course of history: Troy would not have burned but for such passion; imperial Rome would have taken quite another direction had it not been for the mad infatuation of Antony and his Egyptian queen.
Perhaps deeper, more elemental, even than such passionate attachment is the parent-child relationship. What a mother, in particular, feels for her child predates reason and all ethics. It is encoded deeper than any scientist, philosopher, or poet has ever explicated.
And yet of all human bonds the most variable, volatile, and unclassifiable is the marriage bond. The relationship which grows between a man and a woman in a marriage is infinitely complex, mysterious in the extreme, subject to breakdown for a thousand reasons, yet immeasurably durable if the right, indefinable formula is found.
