Proper human relationships are based on love and trust. Love and trust are fortified by commitment. Before the decline of the religious practices and moral values, decline so common in our age, many of the standard human interactions were formalized by sacred vows. Marriage, discipleship, friendship were considered so important for the proper function of the social fabric, that they were ritualistically initiated with the idea that the impressions from the ceremony will stay in the mind for a long time as a reminder that the commitment must be taken seriously. All of these sacred vows were taken for lifetime and some of them (as in the case of the marriage in ancient India and Europe) extended their authority over several subsequent lives as well.
Why the ancient law-givers both in the East and the West paid so much attention to accepting and following the sacred vows? Because they knew that for a human being to be happy he or she must have stable relationships with other members of society. Any break of any type of relationship inevitably leads to tribulations on personal and social level.
This is what we see in our contemporary society. The relationships between people are so unstable that in the first-world countries the institution of marriage is almost extinct. One of the reasons for this is that modern men and women are strongly motivated by desire for personal sense enjoyment. These turbulent desires, which are the norm in our modern world, can comply with any type of personal commitment only for a certain (usually short) amount of time. As soon as the husband or the wife ascertains that there is bigger amount of pleasure awaiting somewhere else, the marriage (or any type of relationship) is dissolved. The interesting times we are living in were foretold 5000 years ago in Srimad Bhagavatam:
Men and women will live together merely because of superficial attraction, and success in business will depend on deceit. Womanliness and manliness will be judged according to one’s expertise in sex, and a person’s spiritual position will be ascertained only according to external symbols.
It is an illusion to think that by betraying trust and breaking relationships in order to attain greater material benefits anybody can become happy. There is not even one instance for this in the whole history of the Universe. The reason is simple – the intrinsic nature of the human being is to value loving relationships with other beings over anything else. That means that all the money, power and facilities of the world are less important than having even one real friend. As Francois de La Rochefoucauld has said, “A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that we take the least care to acquire.”
Since in politics, according to the famous phrase, there cannot be eternal friends but only eternal interests, one should not put his faith in a politician. A politician, or unchaste woman, can do anything abominable for his or her personal interest.
