Focusing on love to the detriment of dignity.

TRANSCRIPT
Hello everyone. My name is Guyomar, and you’re listening to Elsewhere with G. Today I’d like to talk to you about the places that rabbis can take us. Sometimes I listen to Rabbi Manis Friedman. He is based in New York and he has some very wise things to say about many topics, I think, but especially about love. He says things that I haven’t heard others talk about, and he does it in such a way that’s quite original. I find the way he uses examples to illustrate his point funny and very individual. There’s this idea in modern marriages, in modern love, that the most important thing is to show love to your children, to your spouse, that long-term, it’s the most important thing. You always have to remind each other, you always have to remind your children that you feel love for them. He says – I’m summarizing his argument – that love is not the most important thing and that’s what we get wrong about relationships in our time.  It’s often the reason why relationships go sour – because we focus on love to the detriment of what really matters, and that’s respect and dignity.

He gave an example that I thought was hilarious. He said that some people, some couples become far too familiar with each other. So, they lounge around the house in pyjamas, in bathrobes, don’t shower, speak to each other any old way, shout at each other from one room to the other – they become too comfortable. They become too familiar and there’s no dignity in that. He said that we’d be unwilling to open the door for somebody delivering a parcel, for example, in a bathrobe. We’d be embarrassed about that, but we don’t seem to have any problem doing it in front of our spouse, when really, that’s the person who matters most.

He thinks that long-term, couple who are successful, whose relationship works, preserve that dignity. They don’t become too familiar with each other. They don’t become lazy in front of each other. They still see the other person as somebody to respect and with whom you can’t just let yourself go completely. You can’t just indulge in all your bad habits and all your bad traits. I think that’s so true. Familiarity and feeling comfortable with another person, and feeling you don’t have to put on pretenses and airs is one of the nice parts of a long-term relationship. 

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Rabbis on marriage (click here for the transcript)

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