Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
Many a wife has been troubled by the way she can be ill-natured, sarcastic, disgruntled, including with the man she promised to love and cherish forever. The Understanding Marriage! class on Saturday, July 9th will be about a fight every woman has, which Aesthetic Realism makes honest, thrilling sense of: “To Like or Be Displeased—The Unseen Battle in Every Wife.” The class will take place from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM, and is open to all women.
What women will be learning is based on the following definitive statement by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: “The purpose of marriage is to like the world. The reason happiness in marriage is such a rare item is that two people have tried to love in a way that would mean less of a like for the world—in fact, a contempt for it.”
Aesthetic Realism consultants, including Barbara Allen and Anne Fielding, will conduct a lively, down-to-earth discussion of these sentences by Eli Siegel, from The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue 859:
When a woman consents to marry, she hopes to like the man. At the same time, she feels she can like the man without the desire to like as such. There is a big desire in people not to be pleased with what is not themselves. Does one have to be grateful that reality exists, and particular things in it, in order to have a successful marriage?
Women attending will be seeing this great, beautiful fact which Aesthetic Realism at last explains: that the deepest desire of every person is to like the world, to find more and more meaning and value in what’s not herself. And a woman can’t separate her way of seeing her husband from how she sees the world. A man certainly has things in him that can and should be criticized, as a woman has. But if a wife’s hope is to respect her husband and the world more, her criticism of him will have good will—it won’t be narrow and mean. It will make her feel kind and proud, not ashamed. In the class, women also will be learning that a wife can get a triumph in being displeased with everything, and in feeling that her husband doesn’t measure up and that she is superior. Understanding the battle in her and what her deepest purpose is, each woman will come away from the class feeling greater respect for herself and the world, and new love for her husband!