Don's Blog Rilke on Marriage

My wife sent me this a decade ago. Certainly 'relationship' can be substituted for marriage.

 

"The point of a marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries;

on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian

of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is 

an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming in, a mutual consent that robs one party

or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that 

even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up 

for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility

of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet