"Friendship between husband and wife seems to exist by nature; for man is by nature more inclined to pair with a mate than to associate with a fellow citizen, inasmuch as the household is an earlier and more necessary thing than the state.".

"He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god." 

Aristotle

Martin Buber asserts: "In the beginning is relation." Relation (Beziehnung) leads us to encounter (Begegnung).

By nature, man strives for life in community; by nature he is a familial being who can achieve the good life only through sociability, and not through solitary self-sufficiency. The prenatal life of a human being is pure natural connectedness." It seems important to point out that, for Buber, the natural connectedness or natural relation between mother and child underlies every other spiritual relation. It is precisely thanks to this relation that the whole world of relation and of being opens up to us. The child lives from dream to dream, in the radiance and reflection of encounter. Like every being that is coming into existence, it lives in the pre-world. "The child is given time (a term) to exchange the natural connectedness it is losing for a spiritual connectedness with the world, a relation.

Encounter, unlike relation, is not an intellectual expression, a psychological attitude, but an event, in a word, something that happens. Encounter represents the summit of the life of relation; it implies a reflection that unexpectedly illumines a person's life, "it is something actual. Relation is the one-sided acknowledgement of a 'thou' by an 'I', whereas encounter occurs when two 'I's enter into relation at the same time. Encounter is a privilege that I receive. I enter spontaneously into the relation – Thou, thereby fulfilling my "own being", aware that the encounter is not my own doing. Encounter is the joining, in existential communion, of two I's and two thous. It is not the result of my seeking, but happens by grace.

The 'I-Thou' relation, the relation between human beings, has its own form, marked by fundamental features among which immediacy stands out above all. For Buber, immediacy generally means availability, approachability and openness towards others. In stressing immediacy we read Buber's desire to free relation from every kind of mediation, and this can be achieved and can happen only in a relation of mutuality that includes autonomy, independence within dialogue, and unity within relation, which gains its substantive significance in the event of becoming present. This dialogical phenomenon means an understanding of the person, accepting the other as partner and as a whole person, a complete and boundless openness towards the other being, allowing him to become part of my own being, but also freedom for the other to fully realise his own possibilities, and also to realise himself as a person. The primordial category of human reality, the sphere of "the between" (das Zwischen) gives meaning to all of this.

A genuine encounter can occur only within a living partnership (Patnerschaft), in a shared situation (gemeinsame Situation). Dialogue creates, develops and sustains a person. It helps us understand the other, his needs and his expectations; it serves to recognise the values of others, but also to create closeness. It lessens distances through mutual rapprochement and acceptance. The family is the finest example of "a community of mutual self-giving, love and dialogue".

Buber described his work as a process undertaken together by himself and his wife Paula: " Marriage is an example of connectedness. It leads us to a great connectedness as nothing else does. And only in connectedness can we enter into the freedom of the children of God:

Remember how it was in our youth, when we sailed

together on the ocean of these stories?

How image fits image in our hearts!

These new descriptions, a new entity born between you and me“.

Plato says that in love people seek an immortality that is achieved through the union of man and woman: "For the union of man and woman is a begetting. And this is a divine thing, and it is, in a creature that is mortal, an immortal element, namely pregnancy and begetting." According to him, love is an encounter with the part of the soul that we lack, and we find it in a certain person – but in that person who represents for us everything that is good, beautiful, true and just.

Augustine says that the role of love is to free a person from his own self-conceit, from himself, from egoism and self-centredness, so that he may attain his goal and set out towards the Father's house. Since love, together with mutuality, is the foundation of every communion, it occurs in encounter, when a separate thou stands face to face with an I. Then there occurs the love that is between, which sees the being as a whole and only in this way can help it, teach it, uplift it, heal it. "Love is a cosmic action." For the one who is within it, who looks out from it, people are freed from everything that entangles them in a tangled skein; good and bad, clever and foolish, beautiful and ugly, one by one they become real to him, they become a thou, a free, separate individual who stands opposite me. In a wondrous way, exclusivity springs forth every time, and so a person can act, help, heal, educate, uplift, deliver. In a word, love is the responsibility of one I for one thou."

The first experience of a person is the experience of another person. The thou, then, comes before the I, and accompanies it. According to Buber, love is a synonym for "relation" and "word". To paraphrase: "He who speaks one of the primary words enters into it and takes his stand in it"; "He who says thou (...) is in relation." Buber specifies: "Feelings are had; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but reality. Love does not cling to an I in such a way as to have a thou only for its 'content', its object; it is between I and thou." The dialogical principle finds its complete fulfilment in the relation between man and woman. It is a relation in which the structure of otherness comes to light, the importance of difference, which entails mutual responsibility: "This human being is different, essentially different from me, and I grasp (understand) this difference, I affirm him, because I understand him, I want his difference, I want him as he is; this is the fundamental principle of marriage, and setting out from this fundamental principle, it leads us, when the marriage is genuine, to accept the right and the legitimacy of being different, and, with this lived acknowledgement of manifold otherness – even where I am in opposition and in struggle with it."

 Man and woman find themselves in a relation that calls us to mutual responsibility. He calls me, setting out from his trust, and I respond with my faithfulness, or else, through my own unfaithfulness, I refuse to respond, or, having fallen into unfaithfulness, I free myself again through the faithfulness of a response. This is the reality of responsibility: to give an account of what has been entrusted to us within a being that trusts in us, in such a way that faithfulness and unfaithfulness come to light, though not with equal rights, since a faithfulness reborn can overcome unfaithfulness. Where no primary call can touch me, since I regard everything as "my own possession", responsibility has become a shadow. At the same time, the mutual character of life dissolves. He who does not respond no longer perceives the word.

Marriage is renewed by nothing other than that on whose basis it also came into being, namely, that two human beings discover the Thou in one another. The dialogue of lovers is "love without dialogue, without a real movement towards the other, a coming to the other, a remaining with the other; it is a closed love that remains with itself and therefore bears the name Lucifer. Only when someone loves a woman, feeling her life continually present within his own life, does the thou he sees in her eyes allow him to glimpse a ray of the eternal Thou." Between dialogue and love there is no true difference, for every sincere dialogue is inspired and animated by love.

Over almost 60 years of marriage, right up to the death of Paula Buber, their love would show that outward circumstances need not be the guiding force. In 1902, Martin Buber expressed his wish in a letter to Paula Winkler: "Be everything to me: wife, lover, friend and companion."

Martin Buber affirms that he feels no sense of duty towards her, but that he is bound to her by love alone: "All words are too poor for this, but I think you must feel how pure and sincere I am towards you. In me there is not a trace of duty towards you, nothing of that kind, nothing but love and the will to make your life bright, easy and beautiful."

His wife Paula, speaking of the symbol of their bond, speaks of "the golden chains that bind me to you. I can live peace and joy from within myself, only in the security of our love, waiting for you […], so that we may live wholly for one another. All that is good comes only from us, from our love; our shared life needs nothing from outside […]. Above all, Martin, guard your freedom!

Now I often feel how deeply we belong to each other, how my whole being has taken root in you, how all salvation comes from you. I feel this inexpressibly. It is the deepest, best, most steadfast thing I have in my life.

A person must live their life the way one creates a work of art, out of a great impulse of inner necessity. Everything must be subordinated to that. I want only work and you. And that the children be allowed a peaceful upbringing – nothing more than that. I want to be your beloved, for as long as you and I love one another as we do today, and always a faithful mother to our child. In this lies a deep feeling of friendship towards you, and a – I would like to say – emotional tenderness that will never disappear. Of course, even today my love for you seems to me without end, in measure and in time.

Life shows that the desire for encounter is deeply rooted in every human being, but so too is the egoism hidden in every person's heart, with its pronounced wish to turn the other into an object that satisfies its own needs, capable of turning every encounter and relation into a superficial and failed relation. It is therefore no surprise that the principles of dialogue and communication find so little room within the family community.

Buber recounts an interesting event from his childhood that influenced him and shaped him as a person. He spent his childhood and youth with his grandfather and grandmother, because of his parents' separation. One day his mother left the house and abandoned him and his father. The waiting for his mother, the pain of her absence, left a deep mark on his upbringing. As a four-year-old, he was one day playing on the balcony with the daughter of his neighbours, to whom his grandmother had entrusted his care, and in the course of the game she suddenly struck him with the words: "No, she will never come back again." He knew these words referred to his mother. The pain he lived through in that moment stayed with Martin throughout his whole childhood. When, twenty years later, he saw his mother, who had come to visit him and his family, he could not look into her eyes without hearing, from deep within, the word Vergegnung. As he himself testifies: "Everything that I have learned in the course of my life about genuine encounter has its roots in that hour on the balcony." Buber coined the term Vergegnung (parting, estrangement), the opposite of Begegnung, by which he describes a "missed encounter" (disincontro, mismeeting), the defeat of authentic encounter. Vergegnung denotes the failure of genuine interactive mutuality between persons. Buber's dialogical philosophy is an ethical response to the emptiness, the lack, that he lived through in his childhood. For after the separation his mother was inaccessible to him, so that for the rest of his life he became a seeker through relation (Beziehnung) and encounter (Begegnung).

When Buber speaks of the world of experience, he uses the verb gehören, to belong: which would mean to be someone's property, or to be possessed by someone or something, whereas the basic word 'I-Thou' stiftet – produces, brings forth, bears fruit, causes a certain phenomenon; in this case, relation (Beziehung), which shows us the great difference between the two basic words. The world as experience belongs to the basic word 'I-It', while the basic word 'I-Thou' establishes the world of relation: " Man must live; every person must enter this world and prove himself in it. In that world, a person appears as the object of my attention (my attraction), the object of my offence, as one whom I may use and who must not obstruct my chosen path; in a word, there exists no kind of love between us. This is the world of things, of possession, of usefulness, the kingdom of arbitrary will. Man lives with things, changes them, uses them, manages them, possesses them, but even in that case both "he" and "she" are likewise merely a thing, a "person-thing" at my disposal. The person is thus no longer a person, but a thing, an object of my interest."

He describes the ideal form of marriage as a dialogical relation: "Whoever has entered marriage, whoever has contracted marriage and taken it seriously as a sacrament, knows that the Other is: that I cannot have any share in the Being that is without participating in the Being of the Other."

For Buber, using another person is the most superficial of relations. Instead of contemplating the wholeness of a person, I consider his composition, the colour of his hair, the tone of his speech, the scale of his goodness: "As long as I do this, he is not my thou, not my neighbour, but a man who stands opposite me, for I do not experiment with a man to whom I say thou."

An authentic relation always occurs in the moment; it knows no continuity: " It is a world that knows no participation, only experimentation; it knows no encounter, only usefulness; it knows no love, only care or attention for something; it knows no personal destiny, only a chance and insignificant act; it knows no true meaning of freedom, only discretion, wilfulness and arbitrariness; it is not concerned with being, but with possessing. It is a world in which the essence of the subject is not understood directly, but only its representation, its data, evident and transient. And yet how powerful is the continuum of the world of It, and how fragile the appearances of Thou! … When one thing rises above things, one living thing, becomes a being for me and draws close to me by means of language, how inevitably brief is the moment in which this thing is nothing else to me but Thou!"

Every act of understanding requires the experience of "the other"; in order to grasp himself, a person must understand and value others, for in "everyone there is something precious that exists in no one else. The other is thus not one who limits us, but one who allows us to be and to grow. By nature, a person is oriented and directed towards the other, and this leads us to found a community of love and life, which is the place of our whole growth – physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual. From every true encounter we draw the wealth of love, which is a universal and mystical cosmic force that moves mankind.

Buber received this from his own father, of whom he testifies: "But I noticed what really concerned him, when I stood with him amid a splendid herd of horses and watched him greet one animal after another, not merely in a friendly manner but each one individually; or when I rode with him through the ripening fields and watched as he stopped the wagon, got down, again and again, in order finally to carefully take a grain out of its husk and taste whether it was ripe. This entirely unsentimental and unromantic man was concerned with genuine human contact with nature, an active and responsible contact."

Accompanying him now and then on his way, the growing boy learned something he had learned from no one else, from none of the many authors he read and encountered: "In a particular way my father's relation to nature was bound up with his relation to society and to social contacts. How he took part in the lives of all the people who were, in one way or another, dependent on him: the labourers attached to the estate in their cottages that surrounded the estate buildings, houses built to his own design; the peasants who did work for him under conditions precisely set out with marked fairness; how he concerned himself with family relationships, with the upbringing and schooling of children, with the sickness and ageing of all the people. This was not a general concern, but a personal one, in the sense of an active and responsible contact which could in this way arrive at full reciprocity. In helping others, he understood this in a direct way, simply as person to person, and this is what he practised. Even in his old age he wandered tirelessly from house to house to discover people's real wishes and needs; how else could this have happened, except through genuine contact!

One particular thing, however, I must mention. My father was, at bottom, a storyteller. As he talked, simply following wherever it led him, he would tell of the people he knew. Neither more nor less than about their lives and what took place between them."