By Abdullah Al-Omairah

As usual, every evening we try to walk with you for a little while beyond the realm of news and into a gentler, calmer atmosphere.

Among the many messages I received, one text message caught my attention. Its sender asked:

Why don’t lovers get married?

I said: I don’t know!

Then I asked him: Do you have any examples?

I know many people who married for love, just as I know others who married for a variety of reasons and desires. As for passion and those consumed by it, I knew of no reason why they should not marry, and I promised him that I would look into the matter.

But compelling as it may be, the question begins with an inaccurate assumption. Lovers do, in fact, marry. Perhaps the more truthful question is:

Why doesn’t every passionate love end in marriage?

And here comes the obvious question: Is passion or love a prerequisite for marriage?

Not necessarily. Many successful marriages began with acceptance and compatibility, and love grew within them afterward. Love may precede marriage or be born after it, but in either case, a successful life together requires affection, respect, and the ability to understand one another.

Love Is One Thing, Marriage Another

Passion is an emotional experience, while marriage is a life decision and a shared undertaking.

And the question remains: What makes a person fall passionately in love? Is it beauty, an invisible chemistry that draws two people together, or is it love itself that creates beauty in the eyes of the lover? It is said that when Qays was reproached for loving Layla because others did not consider her beautiful, he replied: “Take my eyes and look through them.”

The first may begin with a glance, a word, or an attraction that needs no explanation. The second, however, requires compatibility in values, temperament, responsibilities, and social and economic circumstances.

In passionate love, it may be enough for two people to love each other. In marriage, they must also know how to live together, how to disagree, and how to face money, family, work, illness, and the changing conditions of life.

Some lovers therefore fail not because their love was insufficient, but because it never developed into the ability to build a life together.

One may love more deeply than the other. Love may arrive at the wrong time. Family or social circumstances may stand between them. They may be emotionally compatible yet hold different visions of the future. One of them may desire the pleasure of closeness without being ready for the responsibility of staying.

When Reality Draws Near

Some passionate relationships live on distance, waiting, and deprivation. When marriage becomes a real possibility, the lovers move from imagination into detail; from messages and longing to money, commitment, and everyday habits.

That is when the real question emerges: Can passion become a partnership, or was it beautiful only while it remained beyond the reach of reality?

Some people do not fear losing the beloved as much as they fear losing the image of love they created. They may therefore retreat when the dream becomes possible, because marriage will place that image before the test of reality.

A lover may love the person, but may also love the feeling that person awakened, the version of themselves they became in that relationship, and the future they imagined but never lived. They may even become more attached to the image they created of the other person than to that person’s complete reality.

The grief over an imagined future may be greater than the grief over the relationship we actually lived.

Lovers Who Never Married

History and cultural heritage preserve many examples of lovers whom marriage never united, although we must distinguish between documented events and stories in which history, poetry, and legend became intertwined.

Qays and Layla represent the most famous Arab love story that did not end in marriage. Layla’s family rejected Qays after his poetry about her became widely known, and she was married to another man. The story, however, has been told in many forms, making it difficult to separate historical truth entirely from legend.

Jamil and Buthayna became synonymous with chaste love. Jamil loved her and asked to marry her, but her family refused and married her to someone else. She remained alive in his poetry until separation itself became part of their immortality.

Ibn Zaydun and Wallada lived one of the most celebrated love stories of Al-Andalus. Their relationship ended under the weight of conflict, jealousy, accusations of betrayal, and political rivalry. They never married, but their separation gave birth to some of Ibn Zaydun’s most beautiful poetry.

Kahlil Gibran and May Ziadeh shared an intellectual and emotional bond through letters over many years, without ever meeting face to face or marrying. Their relationship lived through words and an imagined image more than through the reality of everyday life.

Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen reached the stage of engagement, but the Danish philosopher ended their relationship, believing that his anxious nature and intellectual and religious life would prevent him from becoming a husband capable of making her happy. She later married someone else, while he never married, and she remained present in his writings until his death.

These stories do not offer a single explanation for separation. Family prevented Qays and Layla from marrying. Conflict damaged the relationship between Ibn Zaydun and Wallada. Distance prevented Gibran and May from moving from letters into life. Kierkegaard, meanwhile, was defeated by his own inner fear at the threshold of marriage.

Why Do We Remember Them?

Because the stories of those who never married remain more vivid in memory. They are painful, and therefore more suited to poetry and storytelling than relationships that quietly ended in a home and a family.

The lovers who married went on to live the details of life. Those who separated left behind letters, poems, and questions that were never closed.

That may be why it sometimes appears that lovers do not marry, when the truth is that history preserved tragedy more faithfully than it preserved quiet happiness.

Disciplining the Part That Clings

When passionate love does not end in marriage, the person may disappear while the attached part within us remains present. It waits, remembers, imagines, and reconstructs in the mind a relationship that has already ended in reality.

Among the most painful forms of love is carrying in your heart someone you know was never meant to be yours.

Attachment is not simply an excess of love. Love sees and values the other person without erasing the self. Attachment, however, makes the other person’s presence a condition for reassurance, their approval proof of our worth, and their absence a threat to our inner stability.

In love, we move closer because we want to.

In attachment, we hold on because we are afraid.

Disciplining the attached part does not mean rebuking or punishing it. It means educating it, teaching it to endure the truth, and drawing boundaries between need and choice.

We say to it:

I understand your fear, but fear does not decide alone.

I acknowledge your longing, but longing is not an order to return.

I hear your pain, but pain does not make the wrong relationship right.

I respect your need for love, but my dignity is not the price.

True discipline is not cruelty toward the self; it is compassion that prevents a moment of weakness from creating lasting pain.

From Passion to Affection

None of this means that passion and marriage are incompatible. Many successful marriages began with deep love. That love then matured, moving from emotion to affection, from longing to responsibility, and from promise to daily presence.

Those who marry for love do not succeed because they remain lovers in exactly the same way they were at the beginning. They succeed because they also learn to become companions.

Passion knows how to ignite a beginning, but life requires something more enduring than fire: compassion, patience, clarity, and the ability to carry ordinary days together.

Another Perspective

Perhaps the question is not: Why don’t lovers get married?

Perhaps it is: Why are some lovers able to carry love from imagination into life, while others cannot?

The answer does not lie in the intensity of feeling alone, but in the maturity that protects it, the courage that transforms it into a decision, and the ability to accept the other person as a real human being rather than an idealized image.

Passion may open the door to marriage, but it cannot build the home on its own.

The lovers who married built homes, while those who separated built stories. That is why history remembers the stories more.

__________

At BETH, we cover war because ignoring it would be heedless, and we write about life because forgetting it would be a defeat.

News tells readers what is happening around them; reflective writing gently returns them to themselves.

Rest for a while. Some words are not merely read; they pass through the soul until it falls peacefully asleep.