But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that whi… - Joseph Campbell

The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved — by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?

I’ve been happily married forty-eight years, and I ought to know something about it. The important thing in marriage is the relationship between two people, and when one becomes married — I mean really has become married — one has shifted the center of regard from oneself to the relationship of the two. And when you think of yourself as sacrificing or giving up things, it is not for the other person that you are doing it, it is for the relationship. And you are as much in the relationship as the other one is, do you see what I mean? This is what you are dealing with, the two together. And you have to think of yourself not as this one, but as these two as one. And I say if your marriage isn’t the highest priority in your whole life, you’re not married, that’s all. And the thing I frequently say is that marriage is not a long love affair.

In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.