Letter: Long-term relationships change over time, even happy marriages, and so do countries

If you have been married for a decade or more you will know that long term relationships change over time.

The 55-year-old you woke up with this morning might be the same person you married 25 years ago but they are certainly not identical. Your marriage certificate, the legal contract you signed in church has not changed, but your relationship will have changed. Why are you still married, why do you stay together?

Is it mainly because of the unchanging, precise nature of that legal contract from 25 years previously? Possibly, but not if yours is a happy marriage. If you are fortunate, you each have had the confidence to allow each other to develop over the years and adapted as your relationship changed. If your marriage is working you certainly do not keep referring back to that original contract.

Countries are not people but they do develop and change in similar ways. Currently some political activists argue that a change to a 220-year-old Act of Union is intolerable, that even a 3% change in the rules is a crisis. Happy relationships don't work like that and unhappy relationships often do not last. Are we in the unionist community taking our relationship guidance from the wrong people?

Arnold Carton, Belfast BT6