It was, I found out later, a union that almost wasn’t to be, because the young nurse had plans of going to America for further studies – to think that this was in the late 1950s and you can just imagine how unusual that was at that time.

But, for better or worse (as the wedding vow goes) the trip was cancelled and the wedding instead took place. And a year after the mass at Ermita Church (did I tell you that the bride mistakenly went to Malate church and was wondering where her groom and all her guests were?) a son was born, followed two years later by a second, and eleven months after by a third – and then the family was complete. It was a family that was to stay intact for 35 years from the time the youngest was born to the time the young nurse – then already a professor of nursing – finally passed away at a still "young" age of 58.

I got to see that union first hand, because the union I describe above was that of my mother and father. And it has always been to me the type of union that I consider a standard if not THE standard. It was not a hard life that resulted from the union, but neither was it a totally easy life of luxury. It was one where middle class values of hard work, dedication to family and love of country were inculcated – and where the children were taught that the best gift that any parent could ever give a child is love and a good education.

It wasn’t always peace and harmony, I am sure, although I got to witness an argument between my parents only once, which made me suspect that arguments must have been kept within the confines of the master’s bedroom – but more often than not my parents spoke with one voice and you couldn’t play off one against the other to get your way.

But it was, I could tell, a union of two dedicated partners – two people who were together almost every day from May 16, 1959 to March 18, 1993, except for days when one or the other was in a seminar of a training workshop elsewhere in the country or was traveling abroad – and I suppose the dedication to each other was what ultimately made that union work for as long as it did.

Indeed it had to take the hand of God to break that union earlier than either party would have liked. But we’re not here to question God’s wisdom, and so we just learn to accept it and build on from there.

Like marriages, I suppose, relationships between the governing and the governed can be unions made in heaven. But like marriages they would require the dedication of both parties – governments should be as dedicated to serving the people just as the people should be dedicated to helping government. It cannot be that a people are committed to good citizenship but a government is committed to constitutional banditry; neither will it not work if government is dedicated to serve the people but the people couldn’t care less.

But the worst part – just like in the worst of marriages – is when constitutional banditry mixes with public apathy – and the result is a disaster that, in families, creates monsters in the guise of children, who then grow up to sow their own seeds of irresponsibility.

This, I fear, is the path down which our successive unions with government have taken. And this explains why we no longer seem to be incensed whenever we come across government shenanigans or collusion between government and the private sector to defraud the public.

Luckily, we the public have an out – which is the ability every three or six years to "end" the union and begin a new one with someone else. But do we have some default gene that always makes us fall for the "wrong one?"