Exacting relationships
In his masterful book, Heretics, GK Chesterton has a chapter on the institution of the family. In that chapter he says this, It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in the small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. He goes on to describe our natural tendency to form cliques of people with whom we very closely identify, and follows that with a description of the man or woman bent on adventure and new things. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street on which he was born; and of this flight he is always...