My own view is that marriage is a vessel in which we can explore life with a companion. Happiness is not the goal as much as vitality, to be saved from a dull existence. This is not the ordinary wish to have a perfect life—a luxurious home, a good job, and successful children—but a profound and essential urge from the very root of our being to become somebody. At the wedding, most people don’t know what they are looking for. Their emotions have a great deal of energy but not much content or direction.

People still don’t know how to do several things at once or understand the importance of imagination in relationship. They suffer their unions because they think of them as unconscious, surface acts instead of deep developments of the soul. Many people aim for surface compatibility instead of deep, nonrational connection.

Most sacred literature suggests that the opposites that make life so interesting and painful cannot be resolved intellectually. You have to find some other means of getting differences in one place and letting them coexist or blend.

The ideal is not wholeness or integration, but marriage and love, not an overcoming of differences but creative coexistence and mutual influence.

Whatever compromise they finally agree on, it could be rehearsed over the years as evidence of insensitivity, neglect, or a bad priority decision on either part. It could be a source of contention for years and could even polarize the family. Many marriages that once were beautiful and soft and spontaneous and loving have deteriorated to the level of a hostility through a series of incidents just like this.