About marriage and relationships

  This chapter is about relationships from A Course in Miracles perspective.

Let’s start with marriage, since that one that seems to have the most problems.

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

Those words in traditional wedding vows are the first problem. Our modern version of this is the idea that people should strive for “compatibility.” That doesn’t work any better. Physical bodies and egos cannot be joined. Only minds are joined.

This is a brief synopsis of what happens after people are married. Husband and wife get married. They set up housekeeping and after the honeymoon husband gets a job. He starts working long hours to pay for all of the stuff they bought on credit, and this strains the marriage because his wife feels that he doesn’t spend enough time at home.

There are countless variations on this theme, and to be fair to everyone it isn’t always the husband who is away from home too much. But in general that’s the way it goes. Often after less than two years they get divorced.

There is one other variation on this theme I will briefly cover. Although in general physical bodies and egos cannot be joined sometimes you will see couples that seem to be attached at the hip. Among other things you might be having a conversation with them and you notice that they finish each other’s sentences. This isn’t healthy either, because they have no life apart from each other. And when parted by death the surviving spouse is often unable to function.

The marriages that I’ve noticed where people seem to be happy and well adjusted are the ones where they both have interesting and separate lives. For instance both of them may have well paying careers and continue working rather than go the traditional route. And often that works out well.

I will now discuss divorce in this modern day and age. According to everything I’ve read the divorce rate is 50%, or higher. But I don’t view this as a problem. I actually think of it as an improvement because of the fact that it’s easier to get divorced now and if people stay together it’s because they want to. Can you imagine what it was like for women to have to stay in a loveless or abusive marriage because they had no other options? Sometimes people wish we could live in the good old days. But there’s one thing about the good old days regardless about how you feel about them and the issue of divorce in this modern day and age. The good old days are gone. They no longer exist and no matter how much one might like to you can’t live in the past. Staying together for the sake of the children as people used to do is not a good idea either. The stress of a bad marriage is worse for children than their parents being divorced and living apart.

Next I want to cover commonly held misconceptions about children. There is a lot of mysticism involved in conceiving children. People feel children are a part of them, or to put it another way they are creating new life in their image, much as God created us. That may be how people feel, but in fact it’s nothing close to the truth. The truth is a man and a woman furnishes a sperm and an egg necessary to create a new individual. This individual will have a separate physical body and a separate ego and they will not be a part of them. The Spiritual Being of course will be joined with them, in the sense that all Spiritual Beings are joined. Often this leads to disappointment in later years, as the child becomes a teenager, and then a young adult. Every parent’s ambition is to guide his or her children into highly successful adulthood. They save for their college education and tell everyone what a great person their child will become. Unfortunately it is largely a matter of random chance, otherwise known as luck, as to how these individuals turn out. One child, born in a bad neighborhood to poor parents, raised by a single mother, might turn out to be a world-class neurosurgeon. Another child, born into an exclusive suburb, with every possible advantage, might wind up occupying space in the State penal institution. Whichever way it turns out it wasn’t the fault of either set of parents, because it was not under their control. It was not under their control because, one last time, these children are not extensions of their parents. They are individual bodies and egos that function in the physical world of time on their own terms.

Those are some of the problems with marriage and parent child relationships. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on all of the other possible relationships we have both by necessity and choice because there isn’t a lot to say. They are subject to all of the same problems and more. The only advantage other relationships have going for them is we have more of a choice as to whether to enter into them or not.

In closing this chapter I will quote a paragraph from A Course in Miracles. It’s in the text of the foundation for inner peace version, chapter 15, page 319, paragraph 9. This is the single best paragraph I’ve ever read on the subject of relationships. If you really study this, and think about it, and come to understand it, you will no longer be disappointed with all of the relationships you have during the course of your lifetime. 

“Suffering and sacrifice are the gifts with which the ego would “bless” all unions. And those who are united at its altar accept suffering and sacrifice as the price of union. In their angry alliances, born of the fear of loneliness and yet dedicated to the continuance of loneliness, each seeks relief from guilt by increasing it in the other. For each believes that this decreases guilt in him. The other seems always to be attacking and wounding him, perhaps in little ways, perhaps “unconsciously,” yet never without demand of sacrifice. The fury of those joined at the ego’s altar far exceeds your awareness of it. For what the ego really wants you do not realize.”

RR-ESM