Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
Starting out, wives and husbands hope their marriage will be happy and successful. Yet why do two married people so often come to feel distant from, angry with, and resentful of one another? Is the cause something that they have mistakenly equated with love itself: an unspoken agreement between them to console and protect each other from what they see as an unkind, unfriendly world?
The Understanding Marriage! class on Saturday, May 12th, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM, will be about: “The Purpose of Marriage: Shelter from, or Increased Care for, the World?” Women will be learning the thrilling answer to that question!
The following principle by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, is at the heart of this class: “Marriage is a means for liking the world though a person. Too often, though, marriage is a contemptuous exclusion of the world.”
The class, taught by Aesthetic Realism consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, will take up these groundbreaking sentences by Mr. Siegel, from a lecture on marriage:
The mistake, or the thing lacking in marriage…is: most marriage has not made the world friendlier for the two people. And they seek each other sometimes in desperation. They also can avoid each other in desperation….Nevertheless, there is a hope in man and woman that the world is friendly. And most persons, through their marriage, get “proof” that the world is not.
Two people should ask how much fear they have lessened, if any, in each other….Do two people make the world seem friendlier? Or do they, in their need for each other, make the world seem more unfriendly?…The motto of all love can be said to be: I have to find the world friendly through you.
That honest like of the world is the purpose wives and husbands need for married life to fare well, is new knowledge in the history of marriage! And women will learn why using the loved one to be exclusive in some special cozy realm has always been toxic to married life. They’ll have a lively, educational time seeing, through cultural and life examples, that the most romantic and strengthening thing for a marriage is not for two people to be a superior duo against the world, but to increase one another’s a care for it!
The fee for the class is $10. For more information, call 212.777.4490.