I've been have a long-running, off-line debate with co-blogger Greg Prince about gay marriage, so this caught my attention.

Psychologist David Schnarch, author of "Passionate Couples: Love, Sex and Intimacy in Emotionally Committed Relationships" said "People still have preconceived notions and distortions about how love and marriage operate," and anything contrary to those preconceived notions "is hard to get across." A popular notion, for instance, is that people should marry their soul mate -- someone who is "so compatible, so similar that there's no cause for friction," he says. But too much similarity is a recipe for boredom. "Marriage is a people-growing machine," says Mr. Schnarch, who directs the Marriage and Family Health Center in Evergreen, Colo., with his wife, Ruth Morehouse. A real soul-mate marriage is one in which two people forge a relationship "as broad as their differences, rather than one as narrow as their similarities," he says.

Working on my 25th year of marriage (yeah, I got married as a baby...), I can attest to the truth of this. Marriage is less about romantic love, as stated by gay and lesbian activists, than it is about making a working relationship-emphasis on "working".....with an alien.

The transformative power of family life to make good citizens out of pirates and barbarians and bind us to the generations before us and after us is a unique institution.

The frictionless paradigm described by Schnarch as people "so compatible, so similar that there's no cause for friction" describe gay relationships to a 'T'. You can't get more compatible that two lads or two lasses with very near identical outlooks. The reality that so many of these relationships eventually dissolve only underscores Schnarch's assessment of eventual boredom. Notably, traditional marriages almost never break up because of boredom--boring is good in long-term marriages.