Love and Justice

Marriage and the Committed Couple Relationship

Understanding how marriage, how a committed couple relationship, actually succeeds or fails, is all about understanding love, understanding justice, but more particularly understanding the nature of the eccentric relationship between love and justice. Love holds so much promise. Eccentric because it is strange, it is elliptical. It is the citizen who falls in love. It is the institution that captures and encapsulates that love. What is this institution? It is the legal institution of commitment; truly contractual in nature, premised upon what people actually sign off on, and premised upon what they actually practice. If two people get a witness and sign on the dotted line, they have a commitment, especially if they go ahead and practice that commitment, loading the relationship up with the trappings of commitment, money, residence, possessions, friends, etc. If two people actually practice their relationship with all the trappings of commitment without signing on the dotted line, then a commitment it is in the eyes of the law. Love is pure. Love is ephemeral. The institution is flawed, just as those in love are flawed. Love in its perfection persuades the other into a flawless moment, in my eyes, in my heart, and I too experience that perfection, just for one fleeting moment that I long to endure; it doesn’t; it passes. Love draws two people together; they touch each other, they smile; warm into each other, drink-in the aroma of the other, they exchange words, words that carry and become meaningful, then comes the visceral, sexuality, bodies, and in time fluids are exchanged, they rediscover themselves, often in the words of the other, in each other. This is extreme and it is delicate and delicious, for love in its turn promises so much solace, that exquisite comfort, that consolation on offer in times of unbearable sadness and distress, and through the ordinary passage of disappointment, that strips laughter from the everyday. Justice on the other hand (in this context) is about the nature of love made manifest in the passage of everyday life, it is the collaborative material adventure inspired by love, the bricks and mortar of commitment, the roof over the head of love, the food in its belly. Justice is the language of the institution. Justice holds the ephemeral nature of love in place, keeps people who love each other in check, together and holds the hackneyed nature of life in place, as love degenerates hope from the esoteric into the ordinary to be consumed by the material of the everyday. Material is compelling and for the many it is necessarily so. Perhaps, love is the heartbeat, and justice, the body of the beast. The absence of justice in a relationship is quite different to the presence of injustice. Acts of commission against acts of omission. Each violates loves promise of endless solace. They are different actual and conceptual experiences. The absence of justice is hollow, empty. The presence of injustice is a tangible, ever present travesty, a violation, violence, exploitation, and abuse. In marriage, in a committed couple relationship, both of course are criminal acts against the sanctity of love itself. Both violate the promise of unending solace. Many relationships fail as justice evaporates, disappears. How is this so? This speaks into the perplexing relationship between the social and the visceral, the relational and the production or reduction of body fluids. When justice is absent, when justice takes flight, when a relationship is no longer just, it drives the two people apart, either through hostility or apathy or sheer disappointment. Just as the presence of justice in a relationship strengthens love, the absence of justice evaporates love and is devoid of solace at precisely the moment it is most required, the great paradox of the relationship between love and justice. Solace is abundant when least required and evaporated when needed most desired. Love is universal; love is persuasive; in a western context love ordinarily persuades each person involved in a love relationship into making some kind of commitment, usually long-term. Justice unites that love with everyday reality and life itself. Justice makes that love and commitment durable; it makes love real; it provides love with a location and a community of support and the shelter a love relationship requires to thrive. Justice in the context of love is meant to remain rock solid, foundational, a straight-line of constancy, in direct contrast to the eternal fluctuations of love. Justice is conceptual, an abstraction. Fairness is the internal, subjective experience of justice. In the context of marriage and the committed couple relationship, fairness is about the way in which the ordinary, everyday, inequalities between two people in a relationship are managed or mismanaged. To succeed each person must experience the relationship as being fair and just. What does this mean? What is this commitment? In its simplest terms, each person declares to the other “I love you so much that I am prepared take seriously who you are, what you are, how you are in this world, and what fairness really means to you; and I’m prepared to commit to ensuring our life together is as fair and just for you as I can make it fair and just; and I am assuming you feel the same way about me and will do the same for me.” It means that there must be an equal and reciprocal give and take, between each partner. If two people love each other sufficient to commit to each other; to engage in the translation of something as ephemeral as love into something as pragmatic as marriage with its financial, residence, children and other implications; the relationship must involve an equality of love i.e. the two people must love each other equally. This is totally subjective. This then requires an equal ‘give and take’ between the two people concerned – it should be an equal and reciprocal relationship – that is what ‘give and take’ is – ‘give and take’ is the practical manifestation of that commitment – truth is that ‘give and take’ is extremely variable over a wide range of practical functions or relational characteristic and how those relational characteristic are made to work and come to pass.