Pauline Meglino, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
Every wife wants to be kind. She can tell herself she is: “I’m constantly giving, doing things for others, always putting my needs last.” Yet she can’t shake the feeling that there’s something cold and selfish about her. And she can worry, and wonder, “Is there any answer?”
“What Is Real Kindness in Marriage?” is the subject the Understanding Marriage! class will address with refreshing logic and clarity on Saturday, December 12th, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM.
At the core of this important class, taught by consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and myself, Pauline Meglino, are the following definitive principles stated 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.”
Through discussions that are both down-to-earth and cultural, women will be learning something new about what kindness is and is not. These sentences by Mr. Siegel, from his lecture Mind and Kindness, will be taken up:
One way the large problem can be put is this: how to be kind without limit and at the same time take care of oneself without limit. The idea is always to feel that in being nice to something, you are nice to yourself. If in being nice to something you are not being nice to yourself, you are sacrificial. The only kindness, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, that exists, is the desire for the other person to be more complete, more organized, stronger, more himself.
A surprising, crucial question this class will be asking is: does a wife want to see her husband as needy and unappreciative, and herself as superior and ever so noble, putting her needs aside to be nice to him? And the teachers will be showing: for a wife really to be kind, she needs to feel that, as she is “nice” to her husband and does things for him, she hopes to respect him and be a means of their both coming to be in a better, more authentic relation with the world and other people. How this is so in the daily moments of married life will be explained, with deep, lively instances from life and literature. And women will come away from this event with a fresh perspective and solid hope!