Perhaps it's for the saintly people amongst us, like St. Francis who talked to the wolf and showed him the light of being passive, in touch with the feminine, away from the male domination societies wreak upon all creatures, like Emily, who see firsthand the egotism of certain kinds of monogamy.  Such things happen, such marriages, for survival, but in other regards they ring false to the creature's heart. A more communal, friendlier way we were made to love, passive, humbled, the heart needing no rule imposed upon it, 'til death do us part,' 'let him speak now or forever hold his peace,' the guilty renderings of rules back up by stoning to protect the economic set-up, the property-bearing world.

Marriages happen out in nature, the things of wild animals tamed by their own wild nature.  Mating for life happens in the heart, defiant of rules and polite ways, shoulds and shouldn'ts.  Such things have little to do with the way people are supposed to behave by social rules, because the beast already knows how to act in quite civilized manner, with perfect love and kindness.

Marriage as we know it is for looking good as a renter, a way of fitting in to a society that abuses the natural institution ever more, in a more ironclad legal way, the barrel we must jump over to enjoy economic safety, ever since the Empire and the Industrial Age, the nuclear family a unit of workers.

But such a love is a holy thing, a thing of nature, of spawning salmon and nesting hawks, just that we see it with human eyes, hearts and faces, and to us, it looks different than nature.

The best of us would get skittish, protective of the real thing, which is a gift, or be of two minds, one relationship the practical, the necessary, the sane, the other, the one for love and music and letters and art, the body's fitness, Shakespeare.  A love considerate of all, of nature, the planet, the Universe which is no inanimate object at all and all the space and light and darkness, within and without.

The love of Jesus is out on the road, nowhere to lay his head.  The gentle are rebuked in matters of the social pages.  True marriage, and love, is the property of the meek, the suffering, the poor, of the infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.  And yes, it takes courage to realize where its true habitat lies in this world.

But what choice have we but to shine, to not be Nazis about such matters, judgmental, demanding, disgusted with the other who has no sin but that of being human.

Find a rock to stand on, Corinthians, and then will it all make sense, the love for the shitty dying animal whose day will come.