What is Marriage?
As a monk without any personal experience of a married life, I wonder whether I am qualified to say anything on marriage and family. But if you ask any married man or woman: “What is marriage?”, I still wonder whether you get any satisfactory answer either. I will not be surprised if you get ten different answers from ten different people. Again, none of them will be a direct answer to your question but rather a common complaint or discord note of unhappiness obviously directed against their spouse and a deep dissatisfaction that they are fed up with their married life! Everybody would say that this was not the kind of marriage that he or she ever dreampt of. But nobody seems to be clear in his/her mind as to what that ideal marriage is after all! George Bernard Shaw who was once asked to contribute an essay to a book on marriage, gently declined saying: “No man dare write the truth about marriage while his wife lives. I will read the volume with interest, knowing that it will consist chiefly of evasions!”
