The Other Woman: Advice From A Mistress
By Michael Drury. Posted on .
Marriage is the next logical stage in human development, after childhood and youth, and the paradox is that developed powers clamor to be used. To marry is to invite growth,which induces more growth and demands a wider field. Love begets love, as the psychologists recognize, and they advocate ideally a loving home for all children as a means of nurturing and continuing the pattern. But they fail to follow their own insight through to the end: Marriage and the family are a natural extension of the initial human condition; in this context,whether marriage is happy or unhappy is not very important. The point is, it teaches; it completes one’s growth, positively or negatively. And then what? Does one jump off a cliff, or else mark time for the rest of one's years? Read: The Key to a Happy Marriage?
Perhaps the deepest obligation of life is to put off what is outgrown, even when it was true in its day and has served us well, and to achieve as much reality as we are individually capable of. St. Paul said, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The trouble is that we refuse the adult assignment of becoming selves.When we say, "I was wrong," "I make my own joy," "I find the world good," and not, "He mistreated me," "No one understands my needs," "They let me down," then we shall be adults, professionals with the capacity to love and be loved.
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When marriage has fulfilled its promise of rounding out personality, people frequently decide they have fallen out of love, or were never in it in the first place; or that marriage has proved a cheat; or that one partner has betrayed the other.
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These charges may be valid or not. What really needs to be considered is that here one is, stuck with a self, and what shall be done with it from this point on, not how one arrived at it.
