Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
Though wives and husbands have meals together, go places with each other, and share the same bed, often there are thoughts and feelings kept to oneself. “He won’t understand,” a wife can think; or, “If I tell him this, it’ll upset him or we’ll have a fight.” Meanwhile, there’s a feeling of painful distance between two people.
Why couples have trouble communicating, and what can enable them to talk honestly, kindly, and pleasurably with each other, will be explained with comprehension and depth at the Understanding Marriage! class, Saturday, August 13th, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM: What’s Said & Unsaid in Marriage—Can Sense Be Made of These? The class is open to all women.
Taught by Aesthetic Realism consultants, including Barbara Allen and Anne Fielding, this event is based on the following principles stated by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: “Marriage is a means of liking the world through a person. Too often, though, marriage is a contemptuous exclusion of the world.”
Women are going to have an enlivening, educational time through discussion of these sentences from Mr. Siegel’s lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things: Communication:
Communication is the way a person makes his or her thoughts part of another person’s life, or thoughts. The agonizing problem of today is that people can live together for years and really not transmit what they feel to each other. The fields that are not subjects of communication between the ordinary husband and wife are tremendous. All the things that haven’t been said and could have been said, if brought together, would dazzle people with their revelatory quality and their beauty, maybe–also their surprisingness….You have to respect and like what you express yourself to before the job of communication can have a fair chance.
It is deep, thrilling news that how a wife talks or doesn’t talk to her husband, what she says or doesn’t say, has to do with how she sees the whole world, with whether she hopes to respect it and like it. And people attending the class will be asking: can they prefer to keep themselves to themselves—and why? Each woman will come away from this event with knowledge she needs for communication in her marriage really to be, and to succeed!