Zackery asked:

People are social creatures, can somebody still feel spiritually complete without ever getting married?

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I can't believe I'm reading this! Zackery, please,tell me you don't seriouslybelieve that:

a) marriage is the only way of relating socially to someone else!

b) everyone who gets married finds spiritual fulfilment in their marriage!!

And yet this question was asked perfectly seriously in the past. I've just been reading a biography of
Queen Elizabeth I. Of course she never married, but people were genuinely concerned that this
would affect her health. Alison Weir, the biographer, writes: "...it was seen as unhealthy for a woman
to remain unwed: marriage could provide her with the emotional and sexual satisfaction that brought
physical and mental fulfilment. It was acknowledged that women who remained single were sexually
frustrated, given to fantasies and lusts, and had unstable minds." — Alison Weir, Elizabeth the
Queen.

I am not married — or in a personal relationship for that matter. At present there is no prospect of my
getting married, although I would be happy to do so if circumstances went that way. Am I then
doomed to a life of spiritual incompleteness if I never have the opportunity to marry? How about if a
couple lived together and brought up a family, remained faithful to one another all their lives, and in
fact in all respects lived as if they were married — but were not married. Would you regard them as
spiritually incomplete? And if so, what is missing from their relationship that would be there if they had
gone through a marriage ceremony?

Considering attitudes towards personal relationships as they are today, I think it would be more
interesting and challenging to ask whether somebody can feel spiritually/ physically/ emotionally/
mentally complete without ever having sex. But that's another question!

Katharine Hunt

Several questions posted ask what it is to be philosophical? I hope to demonstrate that I think that
one way of being philosophical is to adopt an approach to discussing interesting practical questions
using informal analytical techniques which initially involve looking at the way the key terms of a
question may have been used to produce unusual or 'illicit' meanings and therefore what have been
called pseudo-questions that is, sentences that sound like questions but in fact have a hollow center.

One way we can understand the question concerning spirituality and marriage is to understand it as a
claim or belief that marriage can in some way guarantee the gift or loan of something abstract from
one person to the other that will introduce or increase the spirituality content of one or both parties
and thereby bring about a change for the better.

My initial interest is not with the idea that those undertaking marriage should expect the kind of
transformation suggested rather it is with the practical detail associated with the concept of
'completeness' and therefore tacitly, incompleteness. The idea of 'completeness' when applied to
people suggests to me an image of individuals as static agents living in a static world. If the
receptacles into which the suggested transformations are poured and stored are our identities, then it
is much more likely, given for example that parents can recognise their own children as they grow
and change rapidly that our identities change dynamically even if imperceptibly as we experience a
dynamic world.

If this is the case, the idea of identity has incompleteness built into it, and while a good marriage may
add something to each persons identity, to expect it to add the right amount of the right kind of
satisfaction so that no more satisfaction could possibly or ever be added is setting the individuals up
for disappointment and at the same time shutting them off to the possibilities of new satisfactions that
may arise from new situations they may experience, not the least of which are likely to arise from the
birth of children. If parents are complete prior to the development of their own family how could they
extend their satisfaction to include their children and if they could not would that not be a source of
dissatisfaction within the family not to say bad parenting?

There is also something puzzling concerning the detail of the achievement of completion. When
precisely could complete spiritual satisfaction take place? Could it be before the couple were married
but knew that they wanted to marry? In which case, what would marriage have to offer? Would it be
sometime after marriage? In which case there would be a period of incompleteness and
dissatisfaction while they were married, until knowledge of completeness set in.

Several further aspects of the idea intrigue me. Do both parties have to experience completeness at
the same time, to the same degree, in the same way to avoid spiritual dissatisfaction?

A further source of philosophical interest comes about from the conjunction, 'spiritual completeness'.
Without eliciting more of the meaning of 'spirituality' than it is a special kind of inner experience the
essence of which could never be communicated, how can we be sure that we have achieved the
state of unchanging and unchangeable saturation given that inner experiences can be misleading and
what we sincerely believed was the real thing was in fact not because we later we feel spiritually
incomplete.

Would we be right to feel that our partner had delivered us a false or empty promise, or should we
conclude that the notion of spiritual completeness from marriage is false or even that the concept of
spiritual completeness is empty? And what if sadly we lose or separate from our partner, do we then
become spiritually incomplete and dissatisfied? In which case should we conclude that the feeling of
completeness could only be a happy illusion and also only a loan that we will have to pay back at
some time?

A second source of philosophical interest stems from the juxtaposition of the two concepts of
spirituality and completeness as if they belonged to the same category of thing. Arguably they are as
different as a shadow from the sundial that casts it. Using the term 'complete' as an indicator of
degree, quantity or exchange is not unusual when we apply it to bags of sand, cups of tea or jigsaw
puzzles but applying the concept of completion to that of spirituality gives spirituality a feeling of a
material receptacle into which something can be poured from one receptacle to another until it is full
to the brim. Yet this is equivalent to thinking that the shadow is the material holder of shadowness
and the sundial pours shadowness from the sun into the receptacle and by extension, in the context
of this discussion that marriage brings about an exchange of the abstract fluid, 'spirituality' from one
person to the other.

In summary, the placing of a term used in ordinary practical contexts next to a term used in abstract
contexts has extended a halo of meaning from the concrete ordinary use over the abstract term and
in so doing has given the abstract term the respectability only afforded to terms susceptible to simple
truth tests.

We can tell when it is true that a cup is completely full or when it is false that it is completely full and
by sheltering under its neighbours umbrella, the term spirituality has borrowed the same respectability
so that it seems to be possible to say meaningfully that we can tell when it is true that someone is
spiritually complete or when it is false that they are spiritually complete. This I would suggest is a
question that has a hollow center but is nonetheless interesting because of the philosophical journey
it has taken us on.

Neil Buckland

I feel like saying that you don't really need the institution of marriage for spiritual purposes and that
cohabitation or a love would be sufficient, but at the same time I don't believe that. A bachelor friend
once said that he didn't want to get married as it killed something of one's independent spirit. But
what did he really mean? Perhaps for him, "spiritually complete" meant self-contained. If so, marriage
is really a good thing.

I'm not sure what being "spiritually complete" is, but it doesn't sound like a good aim. Is complacency
a good value to aim at? Should spiritual growth have an end? Should such growth not always be
open to the possibility of something more? Surely it is better to always be open to change,
compromise and growth and this is one function of marriage. The initial commitment is that you will
stay together, changing and growing, through good and bad. Love and cohabitation doesn't entail this
commitment. I agree that man is social, but more fundamentally he is communicative, and the
communicative value of marriage is greater than mere social interactions. If you come to have deep
knowledge of one other person, and realise the value of that person's knowledge of you, then you
have a basis on which to know every person.

Rachel Browne