It's funny, alive, your last graf there is just like the convos I've been having with Foreign Female Friend. It's almost as if there's two ways to look at marriage -- it's a thing, but it's also a place. The best marriages, it would appear, have more of the quality of place than of thing -- as Place, the marriage is a location within which you can both grow. But if it's a Thing only, it can be so static that one person's growth can -- deliberately or incidentally -- be fatal. Very much like the Schnarch discussion on coming into your own.
