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One might ask themselves what the conditions of a good marriage are. The answer to this question depends on whether the person is looking at it from a secular or religious perspective. Those looking at it from the secular view would say that a good marriage is made up of love, trust, honesty, understanding, etc. but from the religious perspective there is an added element. This element is faith, whether it is put in God, Allah, Buddha or another deity. But it can be said that both the religious and secular views have something in common when it comes to the conditions of a good marriage: they believe that marriage is a commitment between two individuals in an intimate relationship who promise to care for each others human needs. In Jerome Nathanson’s essay, “The Ethics of Marriage”, which outlines the conditions of a good marriage in a secular context, he names three needs that marriage fulfills: security, understanding, and genuine concern for your partner. The need for security can be satisfied if there is a “profound awareness that no matter what you are or do, you really matter to the other person and can always feel completely at home” (Nathanson 145). This means that no matter what the ups and downs of the world may be, or what your experiences may be outside the home, or even within the home, that you can really count on the other person. Another aspect of this sense of security is a mutual dependence in which each partner can rely on the other for support and give support in return. Secondly, the need for understanding is both the sense of being understood by the other person and doing everything you can to understand that person. In other words, it involves a constant effort to get at what the other person genuinely means. It also involves good communication between the couple because without communication there can be no understanding. Such understanding as this is not something we are born with but, in the best sense, it is an extremely difficult thing to achieve through the sharing of experiences with another person (Nathanson 146).
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