https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/agnes-callard-profile-marriage-philosophy
Marriage is “an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The whole point of marriage is repetition.” Agnes and Arnold felt that they had entered marriage without clearly thinking through what the institution was actually for. For many couples, marriage ends up being about making a family, and, when it fails to meet other needs, the couple lovingly and generously lets it fail. But Agnes was uncomfortable with the prospect of a relationship that had lost its aspirational character
They were sharing the same space, but Agnes felt as if they were in two separate worlds. She was reminded of a line from the Icelandic novel “Independent People,” by Halldór Laxness, which she had just read: “Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other—there is nothing so tragical as two human beings.”
In “Parallel Lives,” a study of five couples in the Victorian era, the literary critic Phyllis Rose observes that we tend to disparage talk about marriage as gossip. “But gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding,” she writes. “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.”
