A Common Knot in Life?
January 31, 2005
From: MJS
One of my friends is writing her autobiography, an exercise good for the soul for anyone, I think. She has run into a block at the point where she meets the man she marries. I had the same experience in writing my life story. What happens at that point that is so difficult to put into words for us?
My first thought is that we are not honest with ourselves when we meet these wonderful potential spouses. The old “love is blind” cliché comes to mind. We blind ourselves, or maybe we’d never commit our lives, our bodies, and all our resources to that path with another if we saw them clearly. We marry the person as we imagine him to be, or wish him to be.
Then I concluded that nature’s own will to survive has a hand in this instinctual coming together, forming a new family, procreating and so on. Sex drives overcome our intellectual sense. We “fall” for it literally. All our romantic stories reinforce the “love story”, the giving in to love. Months, or maybe years later, we wake up to the reality of the difficulties of maintaining life paths together. Then you really come to love the other person, or not. But by then the children are there too, and if you love them, you do what you have to in order to maintain the family for their sakes. Or maybe you don’t, if that family is so unhealthy that it isn’t worth any sacrifice for. Or you stay married, longer than the children are with you, and then you have to figure out how to live together all over again as older adults.
So years later, when you trying to write about that time of courtship, you find you don’t really know what happened! Did this happen to you too?
Joseph Campbell counsels us to “follow your bliss”, but following the bliss there is hard work and sacrifice to make it all work out for the best. It’s not all blissful.
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Comments & Questions? Email: womenbefriends@yahoo.com
From: MJS
One of my friends is writing her autobiography, an exercise good for the soul for anyone, I think. She has run into a block at the point where she meets the man she marries. I had the same experience in writing my life story. What happens at that point that is so difficult to put into words for us?
My first thought is that we are not honest with ourselves when we meet these wonderful potential spouses. The old “love is blind” cliché comes to mind. We blind ourselves, or maybe we’d never commit our lives, our bodies, and all our resources to that path with another if we saw them clearly. We marry the person as we imagine him to be, or wish him to be.
Then I concluded that nature’s own will to survive has a hand in this instinctual coming together, forming a new family, procreating and so on. Sex drives overcome our intellectual sense. We “fall” for it literally. All our romantic stories reinforce the “love story”, the giving in to love. Months, or maybe years later, we wake up to the reality of the difficulties of maintaining life paths together. Then you really come to love the other person, or not. But by then the children are there too, and if you love them, you do what you have to in order to maintain the family for their sakes. Or maybe you don’t, if that family is so unhealthy that it isn’t worth any sacrifice for. Or you stay married, longer than the children are with you, and then you have to figure out how to live together all over again as older adults.
So years later, when you trying to write about that time of courtship, you find you don’t really know what happened! Did this happen to you too?
Joseph Campbell counsels us to “follow your bliss”, but following the bliss there is hard work and sacrifice to make it all work out for the best. It’s not all blissful.
---------------------------------------------------
Comments & Questions? Email: womenbefriends@yahoo.com
posted by MJS at 1:53 PM
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