How Does a
Wife
Interfere with Her Own Happiness?
by Anne Fielding
In an Aesthetic
Realism lesson
that took place a few days before I married the late Sheldon Kranz,
poet and
Aesthetic Realism consultant, Eli
Siegel spoke about the thing that
would make
me, or any to-be wife, happy. “Your
job,” he said, “is to see everything as well as you can, and when you
marry you
take on that job in relation to your husband.” This is the job of
liking the
world, which Aesthetic
Realism is new in showing, is the purpose of
marriage
and of our lives.
Yet,
throughout
history, a wife—in subtle and not-so-subtle ways—has tried to dismiss
the
outside world and make a private world with her husband as an
accessory.
This “contemptuous exclusion” of
reality
is the chief way a woman interferes with her being at ease under her
own skin,
having that “dynamic tranquility,” which Aesthetic Realism
describes as
happiness, because she’s going against her deepest desire—to be, as Mr.
Siegel
explained, “in the most accurate and romantic relation with the world
possible
for oneself.”
A
great happiness of my life is to teach, with my colleagues in the consultation trio There Are Wives, what we’ve learned to other wives. We’ve seen
year after year that when a woman comes
to know what in
herself has gotten in the way of what she hopes for, that she wants
something much grander than making a separate universe she can own and
run—her
marriage takes on a new life, and a happy direction. I’ll speak
about one such woman, ELiza Meadows of
Connecticut, who told us in her first consultation that though things
were
outwardly comfortable in her marriage, she was not happy and felt
“very, very
blah.”
I’ll
also give instances from a book
published in 2005 by Joan Didion, titled The Year of Magical
Thinking. Ms. Didion is the well-known
author of five
novels and seven books of non-fiction. Her current memoir, which
caused a stir and
was nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize, and received tells about the depression she went
through after
the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne.
She was driven by the feeling—which she
herself says was not sane, in fact was “pathological”—that her husband
would
return, and that she could be the means of this if she did certain
things and
avoided others. For example, she writes
that on the night he died, she refused to have anyone stay with her,
because:
”I needed to be alone so he could come back. This was the
beginning of my year of magical
thinking.”
At
the time of her
husband’s death, their only daughter, then in her late thirties, was
hospitalized with a dangerous illness, and Ms. Didion then had to face
this
situation without him. She says her book is an “attempt to make sense” of what
happened, and she shows courage in wanting to document her most
agonizing
thoughts.
As a widow myself, I know she had cause for
great grief, and
I have
sympathy for her. Meanwhile, I believe the chief cause of her
desolation—which none of the
critics who praised
her book understood—didn’t begin with his dying, but with the ordinary
contempt
she had built up during her life and the many years they lived
together.
Two
questions
central to how a wife interferes with her own happiness are: 1. Is she
using
her marriage to feel, as Eli Siegel writes in the chapter “Love and
Reality,”
“closely one with things as a whole,” or to maintain a separation from
the
world including her husband? And 2. How
much reality does she grant her husband in an everyday way, even as
he’s there,
perhaps in the next room?
In an
issue of the journal The
Right of Aesthetic Realism to
Be Known, Ellen Reiss wrote:
You
can be married to a person
for 70 years and still not see that person as fully real. In
fact, a representative wife does not give
her husband a complete life in his own right. She sees him as an
adjunct to herself, a supporting
player in her drama,
is principally interested in how he is as to her—not how he sees the
world in
all its fullness.
1. A Husband Stands for Reality
A wife, hoping to be
happy, needs
to know that in being close to her husband, she’s trying to care for
the world
itself. This has particulars, and in
the lesson I quoted earlier, days before Sheldon and I took the
marriage vows,
we were learning what that means.
The
week before we had quarreled about our wedding plans which I was in a
whirl
about and thought Sheldon took too much in his stride. Here I was a few
days
before wedded bliss and I was jumpy and irritated. In the lesson,
I told Mr. Siegel “I feel Sheldon is
inconsiderate, doesn’t want to know what I feel, doesn’t understand me,
and
takes me for granted.” As you can see,
my objection was all in terms of how he was as to me, my
personal drama,
and I wasn’t at all interested in how Sheldon might be affected by
taking the
big step of marriage.
“Do
you feel
flighty or solid now?” Mr. Siegel asked me. I said, “Flighty,”
and that all the details of the
wedding were simply
too much for me. “Do you think your
sense of reality could be better?” Mr.
Siegel asked. “Yes,” I said, but wasn’t sure how. He explained:
The
sense of reality becomes a
sense of volume—a desire to embrace and have to do with all of it. Do
you
believe in volume? Do you know that
when you marry, you marry volume?. How
you want to see [each other] is a phase of how you want to see what’s
different
from yourself. It’s a philosophic
problem. In marriage, there’s a
certain square acceptance of the density of another. The other
way is to be tangential.
Mr. Siegel, using
principles of
physics, was teaching us that in order to be happy, we needed to want
to know
each other with depth and width and solidity, not in a flighty,
finger-tippy
way, going off on a tangent which I often did. “The sense of
reality becomes a sense of volume,”
Mr. Siegel said. This is
philosophic and it’s also
practical—as practical as preparing oatmeal for breakfast, seeing those
dry
flakes mingle with water and heat take on more volume and richness
and—perhaps
with some cinnamon and butter—become deliciously edible and
nourishing.
Mr.
Siegel was
giving an outline for the happiness of any two people when he said: “In
marriage there’s an idea that ‘If I accept the reality of you, I’ll be
more
real myself.” The reality of a person,
I learned, is how the world’s opposites are in him—and this means that
marriage
is a chance to know and feel honestly close to the big, various,
interesting
world itself, and to see it as a friend. That is what happened to me.
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