Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

A wife can feel a big difference between what engages her outside her home—such as education, work, perhaps political activity, friends—and being in the kitchen or bedroom with her husband, or choosing new drapes for the living room. Very often she’s felt her home is cozier than the large, puzzling world outside. But she has also felt narrower, out of relation, lessened at home.  What is the answer?

“Domesticity & the Big World Outside—How Can a Wife Be Fair to Both?” will be the subject that the Understanding Marriage! class will address and answer with exciting clarity on Saturday, November 11, from 11 am to 12:30 pm. The class is open to all women.

Aesthetic Realism consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman conduct this thrilling class. They’ll take up the following sentences from the landmark lecture Aesthetic Realism and Love, by the great American poet and critic Eli Siegel:

Love is most often seen as a kind of compact security. It is not seen, as it should be, as an agreement to know….Most women who are interested in their minds nevertheless think that being with their husbands is a time to be contracted and limited. When they are away from their husbands they can expand.…Where love does not mean the knowing and love for other things too, Aesthetic Realism definitely says it’s a fake. A love for a person is a love for persons, a love for humanity, a love for reality.

The class will show: it isn’t marriage per se that causes a wife to “be contracted and limited” when at home with her husband; but rather, it is a wife and husband’s desire to use married life as “a contemptuous exclusion of the world.” And women will be learning that, yes!, a wife can be fair to domesticity and everything else—the big world—when her purpose with her husband is to care more for the world and other people. Aesthetic Realism shows this is the purpose of marriage and of life itself—honestly to like the world.