Marriage is the choice to stay beside someone even knowing they will never change. What does change mean? Becoming what you wish them to be. Can anyone truly become another's ideal? Perhaps not. But two people can stand side by side and accept each other as they are, without transformation. This requires not love, but friendship. My friend need not be my ideal; I am willing to accept him as he is, because he accepts me as I am. This is friendship. Marriage is bearable only if such friendship exists. The problem is this: when people marry, they speak of wanting a friend, but their hearts desire a husband or wife. Unable to shed this desire, they do things unwittingly that no true friend would ever do to another. Love may sometimes survive the loss of trust, but friendship—once trust shatters—never returns. It is not that you cannot forgive your friend; rather, you feel foolish for having believed in him at all. If you try friendship again, you must keep accounts. And that, truthfully, is marriage, not friendship. They loved for years without such troubles; when troubles came, they weathered them together. Yet the moment they married, they began to see each other as husband and wife, and somewhere in that shift, friendship vanished. Everyone is themselves; ordinarily, no one becomes another. True—people sometimes do become what their beloved wishes. Why? Because it pleases them. If it displeased them, they would not. This transformation may not flow both ways; marriage must account for this. Why should what pleases me please another? You ask: how can my spouse be someone other than themselves? You are mistaken. Think clearly. The truth is, except for oneself, everyone in this world is someone other. In the depths of their being, people love themselves most of all. Why love another? Because loving feels good. Why love your child? Because the child is yours. But another's child does not inspire such love! If I love another's child, I do it through thought—*if my own child were like this, if this child were like mine*—all such reasoning. I set everything else aside. Consider those who take their own lives. Why do they? They cannot bear the pain, yes? But underneath lies a deeper failure: the inability to preserve oneself. Nothing else. A parent loves their child even when the child wounds them—this is delusion or enchantment. Love for the child arose at the beginning, and they cannot escape it now. This enchantment springs from habit, from a kind of pull. The love here might be called friendship—soul meeting soul. And because of this very thing, people drag themselves in circles far more often than they drag others.
Man is, in truth, enslaved to himself—enslaved to his own pleasures and habits. Yet to forgive himself, he speaks aloud: *I suffer another’s bondage, caught in the illusions of maya!*
You can tell a friend everything, but after you have spoken, some cease to be friends. Then you think: *Alas, whom did I take for a friend!* In reality, not everyone possesses the capacity for friendship. Some are born merely to be husbands or wives, nothing more. And it is through such manifold errors that man eventually arrives at truth. Some mistake a rope for a serpent; others, seeing a serpent, insist it is rope. But in the end, truth reveals itself unmistakably to man—either through the serpent’s bite, or by the rope’s harmless touch.
In this modern age, to sustain married life with grace, friendship is far more necessary than love.