I want to know whether the sentence
one should love everyone's wife is correct grammatically or not.
I think it's grammatically correct but meaning differs from the sentence
One should love one's wife.
My friend has been arguing with me that you shouldn't use everyone's in the sentence and you have to use only one's.
I said the former sentence means a person should love everyone's wife whereas the latter sentence means a person should love his own wife and both are grammatical.
I can't see anything wrong with the sentence grammatically.
Can you please tell me if I'm right or not?
Best Answer
Well ... it is grammatically correct. However it does not mean what you think it should mean. What this says is that you (or someone) should love everyone else's wives. I'm sure Cassanova, Don Juan, or Donald Trump would agree, but most other people would not.
If you want to say that every person should love his own wife, then you could say:
The challenge with this is that it is not gender-neutral, and nowadays in many places it's possible for same-sex couples to be married. Unfortunately this leads to some awkward grammar, something like:
Not as elegant as we might like, but we do the best we can.
(Edit) A better gender-neutral version would be:
This takes into account marriages where neither partner considers the other the "wife".