agree with Christ that their attitude to life and friendships and affections is more healthy and reliable than that of adults.
To attempt, therefore, to behave as though one was immortal is only to try to recapture the outlook of a child, without losing the experience so dearly bought in reaching adulthood. In attempting to do this, one has to abandon the half-baked self-importance that obsesses so many people; one has to recognise that ceremony is but place, degree, and form, beyond that only poisoned flattery. Instead of wanting to be an important person, one's ambition must be to treat people properly, and to find the world a delightful place, a garden of Eden, in spite of the evil and squalor which is all too evident.
So far so good; but for perfection something more is needed. Each spouse must be able to read the heart and mind of the other, and discover the thoughts and beliefs which are there. It is not difficult. As Marcus Aurelius, that honourable Roman soldier-emperor, wrote in his Meditations, “In the lover's expression the beloved reads all”. There are no secrets that can be kept. To keep secrets one spouse or the other has to introduce distrust, either deliberately or by mistake. What beliefs does a man hope to read in his wife's heart? Surely the belief that she is wife, and he is husband; and vice-versa. With this knowledge, there is a chance that their love will exhibit freshness and spontaneity in its infinite variety. Without it, their relationship will become set in a pattern of its formal ways, which is the precursor of death. Conversation becomes more limited, and even worse repeated, as mutual interests dwindle. Topics of conversation converge on the affairs of the family, as it becomes obvious that more general conversation only breeds disagreement. But there still remains the comfort of mutual faithfulness. How much more wretched to read a spouse's heart and to discover only absence of love; Robert Burns described it best in: ….