This is the advice J.R.R. Tolkien gave his son about marriage

Author J.R.R. Tolkien isn’t well-known for his relationship advice, as his two primary works of fiction are nearly devoid of any type of romance. Yet, at the core of his stories was a love story inspired by his wife.

In a letter to his son Christopher a year after his wife’s death, Tolkien wrote about the origins of his tale called the Tale of Tinúviel.

I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roo in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance… I will say no more now.

When his wife died, Tolkien had Lúthien engraved on her tombstone and Beren was subsequently engraved on his stone. While his marriage wasn’t perfect, he knew what it took to have a successful marriage.

Below is his practical advice to his son Michael, which is profound and displays the great heart that Tolkien had, which he infused into his mythological world.

The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’…but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification….No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial….When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find….But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to.

– J.R.R. Tolkien, Advice to his son Michael (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter, Letter #43)