Partnerships

A marriage is not an equal partnership, where a couple are looking constantly to ensure that everything is divided 50-50. That makes us calculative and mean, and reduces the marriage to a conditional clause: As long as he lives up to his end of the bargain, so will I.

Instead of looking for the right person to be our spouse, we have to be the right person for them. We have to give 110 per cent without any conditions or strings attached to the marriage contract -- which, hopefully, we enter into with our eyes open.

The marriage vow basically says that even if a husband turns out to be a scumbag or a couch potato who cares more for Man U than for his mother-in-law, we still have to accept him.

-- "I Say: To love... is to obey" by Frances Ong Hock Lin, Today Online

There is a feminist inside of me that still cringes at the word "submission," so I usually don't take too well to articles exhorting me to do so. But I thought Frances Ong did well enough, and these few paragraphs, at least, are sobering reminders.

I guess the principle really applies for relationships in general; if we keep trying to measure the proportion of effort put into a relationship, we will never stop long enough to appreciate the true miracle that is the intertwining of souls.

(Related: Faith's "Sit, roll over, play dead, obey... good dog!")

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[Edit: Some noteworthy responses from "Submission: Choice or Trap?"

"The question I pose is this: Do men respect women as much as women are willing to accord men power?"

-- Gwendalynn Lim Wan Ting


"It is up to each couple to decide the terms on which they want their relationship to be built. It is unfair to fault wives who are more independent in their views. Frances found her equilibrium, but I think that equilibrium should not be a template for all relationships.

"Equality comes from the ability to make a choice. Men should never expect their wives to submit, and if a woman does, the man would do well to remember that she does it because she chooses to -- and not because it is his right to have a submissive wife."

-- Felicia Chan]