To Love is Not to Possess

James Kavanaugh
To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one's self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one's self
And perfectly joined in permanent commitment
To another--and to one's inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon's own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child's scars
Or an adult's deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are--and always secretly were,
In the very core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide.

From The Irrational Season

By Madeleine L'Engle
But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two
people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their
love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take. It is indeed
a fearful gamble. Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself
is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creatur
e.
To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take.If we com
mit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a reject
ion of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of free
dom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not posses
sion, but participation. It takes a lifetime to learn another person. When love
is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which
is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

Red Right Ankle by the decemberists

this is the story of your red right ankle
and how it came to meet your leg
and how the muscle bone and sinews tangled
and how the skin was softly shaped
and how it whispered 'oh, adhere to me
for we are bound by symmetry
and whatever differences our lives have been
we together make a limb'
this is the story of your red right ankle

Notes on Marriage by Charles Darwin

Not Marry?
Freedom to go where one liked
choice of Society and little of it.
Conversation of clever men at clubs
Not forced to visit relatives, and to bend in every trifle
to have the expense and anxiety of children
perhaps quarrelling
Loss of time
cannot read in the Evenings
fatness and idleness
anxiety and responsibility
less money for books
if many children forced to gain ones bread (But then it is very bad for ones healt
h to work too much).
Perhaps my wife wont like London, then the sentence is banishment and degradation
with indolent, idle fool.
Marry?
Children (if it please God)
constant companion, who will feel interested in one
(a friend in old age)
object to be beloved and played with better than a dog anyhow
Home, and someone to take care of house
Charms of Music and female Chit Chat
These things good for ones health but terrible loss of time
My God, it is unthinkable to think of spending
ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all
No, no wont do
Imagine living all ones days solitarily in smoky
dirty London House
Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa
with good fire, and books and music perhaps compare this vision with
dingy reality.
Marry! Marry! Marry!