Marriage

This is a post graduate essay on marriage. A dissection. An intellectual (hopefully) discussion that attempts to avoid the emotional.
Marriage is good. It takes two to throw punches at the world. Love is magic. Love really is the thing, no matter how much we smirk about it or ignore it or abuse it. If all humans lived in a perpetual state of love there really would be no war. No killing or abuse and indignity of any kind. The Golden Rule, baby. It could work. But humans are not smart enough for that.
You can be a loving person and bring that into the world and you would be a saint. But if you find someone to love and you marry them, you have increased the power of love exponentially. And if you take it a step further and create kids and treat them right, you have powered love up to a nuclear level and spread it out even more throughout the world.
Now you're talking about Godliness.
Finance is what screws it all up. You need money for food. If you don't have enough money, you fight. You stress, you worry, you curl up into a ball and absorb the cruel blows of the world.
If one partner is making the dough and the other is not holding up the other end of the bargain, problems ensue.
Because the underachiever carries the weight of two. Both suffer, both worry, both stress because of the failings of the one. That is a heavy burden, to have that kind of impact on someone's life. To have worry doubled.
The lost soul would bring less suffering into the world if allowed to live in the dark in the cheapest apartment available to negotiate failure individually. To cope with it or be destroyed by it.
But love doesn't work that way. And that is good. Because love supports. Love encourages. Love never stops believing in the future success of the loved. Love is a lifeline that gently and sometimes not so gently depending on the circumstances, attempts to guide the lost one toward the truth. Toward some sort of salvation.
Awareness of that love on the part of the beneficiary is deeply appreciated, soulfully felt, and gratefully acknowledged internally but often not expressed. Because of the many layers of pain and worry and confusion that exist between the soul of the beneficiary and the love given.
The message becomes contorted and honest communication is lost in both directions.
The underachiever bears the pain of failure and even more so, the pain in the eyes of the one being let down.
Enormous pain.
Ultimately love succeeds. Love pulls the beneficiary up and over, believes the other to succeed. Or at the very least, love nourishes the soul of the underachiever and makes a life gentler.
In evaluating the love equation, infinite care must be taken to factor in the magnitude of both the love giver's patience and commitment, and the beneficiary's pain that blocks honest expression of gratitude.