I offer this as an example of the sort of people that one should aim to never marry:
Many young women said their mothers explicitly told them to act as individuals. "My mother has always encouraged me to be independent and never depend on anyone but myself," wrote Melissa, 22. "She wants me to be able to stand on my own two feet and not depend on a man when I'm married." Elizabeth, 20, says that her mother "continually told me never to surrender my power as she did, to find a way to do right by my children, but to do right by myself also." Tiffany, 18, says that her mother was married and had a child by 19, a life she has no desire to replicate. "I want to be able to live my life and become a pediatrician," she says. "I don't want to depend on my husband or anyone else. I want to be able to show people, and myself, that I can achieve the goals I have set for myself.
- Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before, p. 192
Whatever your views on gender roles (or your sex), I'd argue that interdependance is an inevitable part of relationships. e.g., Consider the following:
... we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. A few years ago, for example, Wegner set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of the couples were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn't know. Wegner then asked all the pairs to read 64 statements, each with an underlined word, like "Midori is a Japanese melon liquor." Five minutes after looking at all the statements, the pairs were asked to write down as many as they could remember. Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn't know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system - a transactive memory system - which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. "Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure," he writes. "Although it is probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory." Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful. "Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems," he writes. "They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding.... They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone.... The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one's own mind."
- Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things can Make a Big Difference, p. 188/9
