"Well maybe, but as Pascal said, *the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.*"
Well sure. But what we need to notice is that we're talking about two unrelated forms of love here: 1) the passionate (sexual/romantic) love that can bind two beings (male/male; male/female; female/female) and 2) the love that binds parents to their children. What I am arguing is that the first kind of love is not necessarily the best foundation for a relationship whose goal is the rearing of children. In fact these two forms of love may be entirely unrelated and therefore why should you give up or distort one in order to have the other?
I grant that in a very, very few cases you can have the same couple involved in and sucesfully negotiationg these two forms of love, but it's rarer than hen's teeth. Mostly what you get is 1) broken marriages and children sacrificed to the pursuit of "true love" or 2) unhappy marriages and grownups sacrificed "for the children" who then grow up with the intolerable burden of making up to the parents for a life not lived.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Joanna