Gary Neuman writes, "Love is powerful, magical, and hopeful. We wish for it, dream of it, and expect it. When we find it, our lives become saturated with meaning. Then we get married" (1). What is marriage? According to Encarta Col1ege Dictionary, marriage is "a legally recognized relationship, established by a civil or religious ceremony, between two people who intended to live together as sexual and domestic partners." Nevertheless, what is a great marriage? In a "Great marriage: You understand each other. You have strong marital skills and are taking the time to use them" (Neuman 11). Marriage is not always as beautiful as a fairy tale, "at least one partner will have an affair in approximately eighty percent of all marriages", according to Peggy Vaughan (3). Guy De Maupassant in the short story "The Jewelry" writes about a man whose wife had apparently committed adultery on him.
The man was named M. Lantin, and he met a girl at a gathering and fell in love with her and then he married her. M. Lantin was then a very happy man with his wife. The couple was economically happy. They were married for six years; M. Lantin loved his wife. M. Lantin disliked two things about her, her love for the theater, and her passion for fake jewelry. One night during winter, after his wife had been to the theater, she came home with a cold, and eight days later, she died of pneumonia. M. Lantin's heart was tom apart due to the suffering of his wife's death. His life became very hard and his income couldn't support him, which in the hands of his wife, had sufficed for all the household needs. He wondered how she could have "managed to furnish him with such excellent wine and with delicate eating which he could not now afford at all with his scanty means" (Maupassant 10). Therefore, he got into some debt, and wanted to sell something, and he thought of his wife's jewelry. M. Lantin took the jewelry to a jewelry-store, and found out that the jewelry was in fact real M.