Pauline Meglino, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
In becoming a wife, a woman says in a big way that she needs her husband. Yet the very idea that she needs someone besides herself, troubles many a wife: she can feel that in needing her husband she is somehow curtailing her individuality, losing her autonomy. (Men can have such a feeling too.)
“Need & Independence: How Can a Wife Make Sense of These in Herself?” is the subject that the Understanding Marriage! class will address and answer, on Saturday, July 11th from 11 AM to 12:30 PM. Each class is an important event, with cultural instances and lively discussion, conducted by consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and myself, Pauline Meglino. The basis is this 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.”
Love has been called a proud need by Aesthetic Realism. Every person would like to be secret, sequestered, alone, do things for oneself, and every person wants to be loved without limit. It can make for great trouble. When we’re involved with a person and we’re not proud that we need that person, there has to be anger. There’s a certain pleasure we have in showing we don’t need anybody. Aesthetic Realism says good sense is the needing more and the being proud of it.
The class will show: a woman will be proud of needing her husband if she uses being close to him to care truly for the world and people, which includes wanting passionately to understand and be fair to him. And she’ll be honestly independent because she will be going after her own deepest purpose as a self : to know and find meaning and value in the world.
The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene St., off W. Houston St., in SoHo, is a not-for-profit educational foundation. The fee for the class is $10. For more information, call 212.777.4490.