Bukowski: If you’re weak enough to seek instruction, you’re generally not strong enough to do anything else.

 Nietzsche once remarked that marriage is a conversation, a long dialogue. If a person is not ready to engage in such a prolonged dialogue, they are not ready for long-term close relationships. Many long-married couples have long since exhausted all topics of conversation because each spouse has stopped developing their individuality.

By focusing on individual growth, we each gain an interesting conversation partner. To halt one’s own development, even in the interest of another person, means admitting that your spouse will have to live with someone who feels anger and suffers from depression. Such marital relationships need to be radically reconsidered, or they will simply lose their meaning.

— James Hollis, The Middle Passage