Beloved philosopher and poet Kahlil Gibran on the secret to a loving and lasting relationship – The Marginalian

“What's the point of falling in love if both of you stay idle like you used to be?” Mary McCarthy asked her friend Hannah Arendt in their books about love. The question arises because it speaks of the basic need for love – true and powerful, love always changes us, eliminates our painful diseases and elevates us to our highest human potential. It allows us, as Barack Obama so eloquently wrote in his reflections on what his mother taught him about love, to “transcend our individuality, and then, if we're lucky, [be] in the end it was transformed into something solid.”

But in the concept of love upon which our modern romances are built, the intensity of that union is taken so far as to make love fragile. If the couple is expected to be intimately and completely together, the relationship turns into a paralyzing code – a calculated and rigid rigidity that weakens into the possibility of growth. In the most nourishing form of love, the communion of communion is accompanied by the integrity of each person, the two elements are always a dynamic and fluid conversation. Philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this well in his love letters to Hannah Arendt: Why is love richer than anything else that can happen to humans and a sweet burden to those who hold it? Because we become what we like and yet remain ourselves.

This difficult balance of intimacy and independence is what the great Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher. Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) explores with unusual insight and poetic precision the role of his 1923 masterpiece. The Prophet (public library).

By way of advice on the secret to a loving and lasting marriage, Gibran offers:

Let there be gaps in your unity,
And let the winds of heaven dance between you.

Love each other, but do not make a bond of love;
Let there be a moving sea in the midst of the sea of ​​your souls.
Fill each other's cup, but do not drink from the same cup.
Give your bread, but do not eat one loaf.
Sing and dance together and be happy, but let each of you be alone,
As the strings of the lute are alone even though they vibrate with the same melody.

Give your hearts, but not to the end of each other.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
Stand together, yet not too close together;
For the pillars of the temple are divided;
An oak tree and a cypress tree do not stand in each other's shadow.

Fill this particular part of interest completely The Prophet and Virginia Woolf on what makes love last, philosopher Alain Badiou on how we fall and stay in love, Anna Dostoyevskaya on the secret of a happy marriage, Mary Oliver on how disagreements bring couples closer, and Joseph Campbell on the single most important factor in sustaining a love relationship, then revisit Gibran on what it seems like to be who you are versus being proud of your true self.