The Other Woman: Advice From A Mistress
By Michael Drury. Posted on .
I can only conclude that many people do not want love, and they use marriage as a bulwark against it, however unlikely that may sound. Oh yes, they make all the appropriate noises, but they don't really want to be disturbed. In some half-buried memory, they know that strong emotion extracts a price it frightens them to think of paying out of their meager resources—a price of effort, courage, attention. They would rather read about great loves or watch them on screen than participate in them.
Excerpted from Advice To A Young Wife From An Old Mistress, by Michael Drury. copyright 1958, 1965, 1993 by Michael Drury. Published by arrangement with Random House, inc.
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The following is an excerpt from Advice To A Young Wife From An Old Mistress, by Michael Drury.
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I am more like you than you might suppose. A mistress shares a secret with a newly wedded wife: that love is a kind of glorious grief, equidistant from happiness and tears. Read: Newlywed Cheating And The Uncertainty Principle
I am apt to be more like you than your mother, who long ago determined the shape all love must take, and has forgotten that each day's choices, even now, have anything to do with it. Nor is she wholly wrong. Love lived from day to day takes on a momentum of its own, but that is not the all of it. If a mistress knows more of romance and a wife more of practicalities, is there not some wholeness implied here worthwhile to explore? Read: Why "Wife" Is A Dirty Word
