LOVE IS LASTING...

“THERE is something amphibious
about marriage, something neither fish nor fowl,”
writes Mike Mason in The Mystery of Marriage.
“It is like a three legged sack race
or a cloth-covered dancing horse;

Except that it is not only
the feet and body but one’s
whole being that gets tangled
in the other person’s marriage
is not just a sharing but
mingling of identities, a consanguinity of psyches.

It is a blend so intimate
that is actually becomes hard to tell
where one person leaves
off and other begins.

People will peer and peer,
for example, at a couple’s offspring,
trying to determine which one
of the parents they resemble.

Perhaps in a mysterious way
what they are really trying to do
is to tell the couple themselves apart,
to separate again what has become impossibly
intertwined not that this uncanny
congruousness of the flesh of inner lives always

a very obvious or noticeable fact;
but it becomes conspicuous
in the birth of a child or at other
times of crisis or suddenly and dramatically to the surface.”
That is truly what it means to become “one flesh.”

Love is lasting comes in erasing
the boundary line between
“mine” and “yours.”