The secret to marriage is standing apart

Gibran's On Marriage contains his most quoted counsel: "Let there be spaces in your togetherness." Love should not become a merging that erases two people into one. "Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup," he writes; "sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone."

His image is the temple pillars: "the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow." Two things can hold up the same roof precisely because there is distance between them. Closeness that smothers destroys the very structure it means to support.

The teaching cuts against romantic cliché. Marriage endures not through fusion but through two whole individuals who choose to share a life while each keeps their own soul intact. Union without solitude, Gibran suggests, is not love but dependence.