Building a marriage can be a joyful experience, but surrendering to another person is never a happy choice.

Human marriage is part of a larger process of reconciling differences. It has social and cosmic implications, and, when entered deeply, can even contribute to world peace.

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.

We have to love our own complexities and contradictions, encouraging an interior marriage and eroticism of the soul.

Many people claim to have integrated their shadow sides, but that effort is itself a work against the dark. To integrate it is to co-opt it into the light. The real task is to live in, and with, the darkness, appreciating its unredeemed value and loving its irreversible qualities. What is needed is a view of life that includes the dark.