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“Over the centuries have not knights and adventurers experienced incredible toil and trouble in order to find quiet peace in a happy marriage. Over the centuries have not writers and readers of novels labored through one volume after another in order to end with a happy marriage. And has not one generation after the other again and again faithfully endured four acts of troubles and entanglements if only there was any probability of a happy marriage in the fifth act?

“But through these enormous efforts very little is accomplished for the glorification of marriage. For the unhealthiness of these books is that they end where they should begin. So let Don Juan keep his romantic bower and the knight his nocturnal sky and stars—if he sees nothing beyond them. Marriage has its heaven even higher. And it is not the earthly heaven that arches over marriage but the heaven of the spirit. So beautiful is marriage. And the sensuous is by no means repudiated, but is ennobled.

“Indeed I confess it—perhaps it is wrong of me—frequently when I think of my own marriage, the notion that it will cease to be awakens in me an inexplicable sadness, as does the thought—sure as I am that in another life I will live with her to whom my marriage joined me—that this will give her to me in another way, and the contrast that was a condition of our marriage will be annulled. Nevertheless it comforts me that I know—and I shall recollect—that I have lived with her in the most intimate, the most beautiful association that life on earth provides.”

Adapted from Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage” (Either/Or, volume II)