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    04 June 2012| last updated at 12:18AM

    LOVE, MONEY AND MARRIAGE: Compatibility is key

    By Hassan Talib, Gombak, Selangor

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    I REFER to the debate as to what constitutes a lasting and happy marriage in the letters column. Let us ponder the following words of wisdom on "marriage":

    JANE Austen: Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance;

    JOHN Dryden: Here lies my wife: here let her lie. Now she's at rest, and so am I;

    BENJAMIN Franklin: Where there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage;

    THOMAS L. Peacock: Love is to be avoided because marriage is at best a dangerous experiment;

    SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge: The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman; and,

    HENRY Wadsworth Longfellow: The men that women marry and why they marry them will always be a marvel and a mystery to the world.

    There is a beautiful film on marriage, Far From Heaven, starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert, which all newly- married couples and those whose marriage is on the rocks should see. It is the story of a husband who is deprived of sex and attention by a wife who loves him so much.

    Marriage is not a bed of roses and not made in heaven. It is about compatibility. Marriage is about the baby's milk, bills, holidays, sports, books and, of course, sex.

    I have a friend who habitually drums his chest with pride and arrogance at official meetings that he loves his wife very much and berates his officers and others for not loving their wives or giving their wives that loving attention.

    And he hates his officers or friends who take a second wife or have affairs.

    Sigmund Freud would say my friend is sexually deprived and is not a happy person, psychologically speaking. It is a form of defence mechanism to make him feel good. Such a man will take a second wife when he comes across a woman whose face can launch a thousand ships. God has a way of answering the arrogance in man.

     

    Marriage is not a bed of roses and not made in heaven. It is about finding harmony in the relationship.

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