Pauline Meglino, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
Many a woman, anticipating her marriage to her soon-to-be spouse, has thought, “We’ll only need each other!” Wives and husbands can take such a feeling to be the very height of love. Yet why, instead of their love increasing, do they find resentment, suspicion, and arguments mounting between them?
“Can a Wife Really Love Her Husband If She Doesn’t Like Other People?” is the topic that the Understanding Marriage! class will address with marriage-saving clarity, on Saturday, September 12, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM.
This wonderfully practical and cultural class is taught by consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and myself, Pauline Meglino, and is based on the following explanation by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: “Marriage is a means for liking the world through a person. Too often, though, marriage is a contemptuous exclusion of the world.”
The focus of discussion will be the following kind, crucial sentences from Mr. Siegel’s lecture Aesthetic Realism and People:
To dismiss the rest of the human race and say, “I’m going to love Marie” or “I’m going to love Montgomery” can never work. The purpose of loving one person is to love people and things in general. What happens most often is that through loving one person, we get to be less interested in people. We have a notion that since we’ve caged a person, our job of understanding other persons is over. And so the function of love—which is the understanding of people and reality as a whole through the close, musical, complete seeing of one person—is not kept to….Love for a person cannot be dissociated from love for people in general.
Each woman at this deep, lively event will learn that there is a direct relation between her love for her husband and her attitude to other people. Learning that real love means encouraging each other’s care for other people by wanting to understand and be fair to them, gives marriages a fresh start!