Happiness in the couple, an indecipherable mystery
Years ago I wrote a book about marriage that I dedicated To my wife, that charming and eternal mystery. We had just celebrated the silver jubilee and thought I could string together some ideas that would serve as 'notice to navigators'. In my years, the 'autobombo' is excused, and for that reason I would add that since then I continue to sell a few thousand each year.
Today I want to focus on a word of the dedication to which I turn when I hit something hidden to what I just did not find the bottom: I call it "mystery". Today I keep what I wrote years ago and I still reaffirm more in it, because it surprises me frequently.
This idea assails me every time I try to probe the statistics of marital breakdowns and the 'simplicity' with which the reasons that cause them are dispatched. In a very few years it has been found that marriage is a 'scapegoat', causing all the misfortunes that our foolish ancestors have not been able to identify or destroy. If we root out the problem, the man and the woman can dive headfirst into happiness, without further affective obstacles.
No and a thousand times no. The lack of happiness it is just another label with which we seal the package of so much dismay, presenting a package that so many times makes us victims, worthy of being understood. I remember the sensible question that one woman answered another when she complained about these times: "Where are we going to stop?" Without changing the smile, her friend replied: "Where you and I want to go."
We are going to enter thoroughly. A few years ago Sophocles put in the mouths of his characters that "in the world there are many mysterious things, but none as mysterious as man". Some centuries later, Borges expressed this same thought in a more poetic way: "For me I am a craving and an arcane, / an island of magic and fears, / as are, perhaps, all men".
Man and woman, the human being, are a mystery. It is a peculiar animal of a rational, social, moral and sentimental nature. I do not remember now the author or the novel but I thought a phrase in which slipped: "I do not know what there will be in the depths of a criminal, but I looked at the soul of a good man and I took every disappointment."
Dispatch a marriage crisis with a couple of common topics and slogans, at least denotes a very serious lack of minimum rational rigor. "Ah, it's that you're getting into Honduras!" A friend told me. Are we not talking about something serious?
Most of the problems in marriages - we have all had them - are not found in the marriage institution, but in two people. It is not easy for men and women, who lived the first 20 years without knowing each other, with different educations, different feelings, hobbies and unknown friends, one day they get married and everything goes smoothly. Something has happened here. Two mysterious beings have come together and it is logical that the coupling does not occur with the speed of an electronic machine.
To enter the jungle of what is inside a man and a woman, the first thing they have to ask themselves is the great truism: "What do I want, what do I look for?" It is nothing new, but it is elementary. Aristotle, who is not a mummy, said in his Nicomachean Ethics that "not ordering life to an end is a sign of great foolishness". With the permission of the great philosopher, I would add that this goal is love.
But love is not just a couple of carantoñas and a period of ecstasy, it's a long road full of ups and downs with problems and resolutions.
Sorry I went up to the vine today. A great teacher I had had the peculiarity of leaving questions on the air without giving the answer. My thing is to disturb, and you to think. That has been proposed these rallying lines.
