Relationship Issues

Relationship issue has been a crucial cornerstone in maintaining a harmonious society since human being emerged on the earth. I believe this is so because in Confucius’ day, which is about 2500 years ago, there was already education delivered on relationship issues.

The Confucians categorized relationship into 5 main issues saying: Leader & group member; parent & children; husband & wife; siblings’ relationship; friends’ relationship. Among the 5 types of relationship, Confucians believe husband/wife relationship is the foundation of maintaining a harmonious society. So if one can manage to hold a marriage of average quality level over 20 years, he is contributing a lot to the peacefulness of the society.

It will be the 30th anniversary of our marriage on the next 15th of January. Across the 30 year period, there was no serious quarrelling or even a physical fighting between us. Yet, that doesn’t mean the prince and the princess lived happily throughout their marriage life. There were argues on tiny matters from time to time. The place where our conflict occurred most often is the kitchen. Each of us has our own ways and ideas in making a dish.

For example, I tend to add some corn flour to thicken the soup that comes out of the vegetable in stir fry so that the flavour in the soup can evenly coat over the vegetable. But Jean prefers to turn the heat up high to vaporize most of the soup. So we often criticize each other about cooking differentials in the kitchen. The drama naturally resulted in an unpleasant dinner.

There are other areas where we can start a cold war lasting a couple of days such as child discipline, holiday ideas and various other day-to-day matters. The result of the war normally ended up with an apology from me initiatively, and Jean usually accepted it by saying ruefully: “mei2 shi4” meaning there was nothing happened signalling the end of the war.

Most of my family friends are leading a harmonious marriage relationship except one who had failed his first marriage and was going through a breaking up process with his second marriage recently. I review these good and bad cases and come to a conclusion that to maintain a good relationship, the husband has to be a modest type of person, and either side has to have a reasonable level of tolerance. My parent taught me with an old saying: “there is no one-hand clap” meaning a fight will not erupt if the other side takes no reaction.

I am very grateful that my parent had taught me good values and shaped me into a modest type of person so that I can enjoy the fruit of various relationships.

In the above mentioned 5 categories, Confucians believe that marriage relationship leads the other 4 ones because marriage is something to do with “manufacturing” the next generation. Without a harmonious marriage, a decent citizen can by no means be produced for the society, thus a peaceful world can not be developed. Based on this logic, don’t you think we, the married people, are bearing a very important mission if we mean to contribute to the human society?