Transcript:Hossain Danesh/Developmental Stages In Marriage

Transcript of: Developmental Stages in Marriage by Hossain Danesh

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[0:04] In an attempt to understand what really love in marriage is, we have to develop a much broader framework of understanding about the nature and characteristics of love. This is especially important in the culture that we are living. Because in this culture, love has been reduced to a very simple superstition and immature concept. And when people talk about love, either they are talking about a feeling that they cannot describe, and when you tell them to describe it they say "you know", "you know what I mean", okay. Or if you want to have a more elaborate description of love, they say "wow". Or something of that nature is the definition that they give you of feeling love. Furthermore, people think that love is a phenomenon that happens to them, that they don't have control over it. And they either fall into it or fall out of it, and it is totally out of their control. So you hear couples coming for counseling and say "What is the matter?" And one of them very sadly says, "Well, I have fallen out of love with my spouse" or "I have fallen in love with somebody else". You see as parents that your child, your young daughter and son, comes to you and says, "I have fallen in love." And this phenomena of falling in love becomes so all-consuming, taking so much energy and power of that individual that the person, for all practical purposes, cannot see anything else. It is in that situation of falling in love that person really doesn't follow the rules of mind, of logic, of reasoning, and is consumed with an emotion and a feeling of a tremendous power. Now, this initial type of love later on leaves the individual, and then people begin to try to see whether they can reenkindle that initial flame that they had. And the problem that emerges is enormous, and I would try to in the course of this hour describe some of the aspects of this process.

[4:02] To begin however, I like to start my talk by saying that people are lovers. All human beings are created as lovers. This love furthermore, is with us from the very beginning of our lives. At the beginning, in the childhood stages, the love manifests itself in the form of a yearning, of a desire. The individual wants and desires, and wants more and desires more. This yearning involves all aspects of the being of the person. A child, of course, wants more food, wants more comfort, wants more attention. As we grow older, then we want other things. We want this thing and that thing. We want better clothes. We want bigger toys. We want this and that. As we evolve, this desire, this wanting, this ontological quest that is inherent in human beings begins to have other objects, such as knowledge, such as another person, such as an idea, such as a faith, such as a nation, such as warmth, such as God. So what happens is, is that yearning that is there, this quest that is inherent in human being, as this person grows and evolves and as he or she decides upon the direction of life, the objects of the love of this person changes. So at one time, he is in love with money. At another occasion, he may be in love with a person. On another occasion, he would fall in love with his work. Some would fall in love with an idea. And so the differences between people is not that some people love more than others. It is the difference of the object of the love that they choose. And by and large, your love is as magnificent, as glorious, as exciting, as marvelous as is the object of your love. If you love war, you would be a warrior. If you love money, you may become rich or be upset that you're not rich. If you love power, you may be totally intoxicated with power that you have or you would feel totally unhappy that you didn't get what you want. But by and large, people are created as lovers. What differentiates them is the object of their love.

[8:27] But that is crucial to understand because immediately as you do that, you realize that your will play a tremendous role in the nature of your love. Because it is through your will that you decide upon the object of your love. Yes you are born a lover, but what you choose as the object of your love is your decision. Okay? Now if things were that simple, it would be easy to drop the matter and say, "Ok, we understand love now. Let's go to something else." But that's not as simple as this. This is the beginning. This is the general framework. However, love in the context of the marriage on the one hand, and in general on the other hand has several characteristics that we should keep in mind. Before we do so, a preamble is necessary. One of the laws of creation is the law of progression. Everything that is created is constantly evolving and progressing. Human beings constantly evolve and progress as individuals. And human beings constantly evolve and progress collectively. Therefore, all aspects of the life of the human being, all of them, are subject to this law of progression, of evolution, of development, every aspect. And therefore love falls into that category as well.

[10:54] So, you have to see what are the developmental stages of love? Because if we understand the developmental stages of love, then we would be able to identify where we are in that respect. At the beginning, love between two individuals is one-directional. For example, in the context of the marriage, when people marry at the beginning the husband tries to prove to his wife how good of a lover he is. Everything that he does in order to show his love to her is to prove to himself and to her that he is indeed a good lover. And because of that, he is preoccupied primarily with himself. Even though he is showing love to that other person, he's preoccupied with himself, trying to prove something about himself. The wife is involved in the same process at the same time. The wife also tries to show her love for him by the things that she knows how to do, in order to prove to herself and him that she is indeed a good lover. And depending on how mature or unsure we are of ourselves, this process takes one shape or another. But nevertheless, the lovers at this stage are totally preoccupied with themselves.

[12:54] So when they love each other, their love crosses. Many a times their love doesn't meet. There are many examples of one-directional love. I'll give you some of them. I saw a recently married couple who came very upset. And the situation was this: that one day, the husband coming home decided that he's going to show his love for his bride and brought twelve long-stemmed roses for her, upon which she began to cry and cry, get angry and say, "You do not love me. You never have loved me. We shouldn't have got married." This poor character sitting there, wondering what did he do wrong that should have received such a response from her. And she wouldn't talk to him. The only thing that she said, "We want to go and see somebody right away." So they come. So I turned to her and said, "What happened?" She said, "But he knows that I'm allergic to roses." Well of course he has forgotten that she was allergic to roses. What he was doing in excitement for his own self, trying to show how much he loved his beautiful bride that he had bring the long-stemmed roses which you know is the hallmark of showing your love, forgetting that she is allergic to roses, okay, get's really sick by it. So you see this is a one-directional love.

[15:11] As a matter of fact, because we are talking about developmental stages, the love stages also manifest in the collective beauty of mankind, the collective life of mankind. One of the ways that you can see how a culture, or what level of development a culture is, you go and study their love story. The love story will usually tell you where the culture is. For example in Persian literature, you have these two lovers, Shirin and Farhad. Shirin is a princess. She sits there and sips from her drink, and they come and they cool her off and she puts a little blush on her, and she's just sitting there having really, good time. Farhad is a poor stonecutter, young handsome man but poor, not belonging to the royal family. And he wanders one day and comes and sees this absolutely beautiful princess and falls in love. Is dangerous when you're a stonecutter to fall, but nevertheless he did. He fell in love, and he went to the king and said that I want to marry the princess, Shirin. And the king, being the kind of king that he was, he says "Of course, you can marry the princess, only you have to do one thing." He said, "Anything." He said, "You just simply go and cut piece by piece that mountain and move it from there to there. Once you have finished, you can marry Shirin." So Farhad went and start cutting the stone, putting it all in [?], moving it from here to there. In the meanwhile Shirin had the time of her life, got married a few times, did everything that she wanted, and the poor cutter died. Okay? To this day, Farhad's are doing that. It's a very good example of one-directional love. One gives and gives and gives, and the other one receives and receives and receives, and that's it.

[17:48] Of course there are other examples of one-directional love that are very healthy. For example, the love of the parents to the child, by and large is a one-directional love. The parent shows his love or her love by giving to the child. And the child shows his or her love by receiving. Okay? The parent gets upset if the child doesn't receive it. I have seen many parents who say, "My child doesn't love me." they said, "Why you say that?" They said, "Because doesn't matter what I do for him, he is not happy." You see, doesn't receive the love. And then they get upset. Or for example for a dog there are times that one-directional love are perfectly healthy. For example, if you're sick and somebody comes and take care of you. But how many of you know people who are awful patients? They never would allow you to take care of them. "No, I don't want you to do this. You don't take care of me. I would do it myself." Because they don't know how to receive love. Okay?

[19:09] So the one-directional love is the first stage of the love relationship. Then gradually as the love relationship evolves and develops, and also as the person evolves and develops, we reach to the second stage of love. And the second stage of love is the competitive stage. It is a stage in which the husband and wife, the lovers begin to compete with one another, trying to show who loves who the most. And one is husband saying "I love you most", and then the wife says "I love you moster", and "mostest" and "mostest mostest". And they go back and forth trying to show how much they love each other. Or if it is a negative relationship, they try to prove how much the other person loves them less. "You love me less than I love you." You know, kind of a thing. There is a comparison that goes on all the time. In either case, the competition can become more and more negative. The competition can become more and more problematic. What happens is in this process is that eventually, really, at this level if the lovers are not aware of what is happening, they can actually sever their relationship. Because here at the level of competition, they become doubtful about one another, doubtful about themselves, or they love each other to death.

[21:22] The process of loving each other to death is a very interesting process. You find it in Romeo and Juliet. Okay? Romeo and Juliet what'd they do? They just simply love each other to death. That's what they do. Okay? One says "Oh, I love you" and the other one says "I love you more" and that goes back and forth and back and forth until the two of them are dead. Okay? And this has been considered as the ultimate of the love relationship. The lovers, once again, are preoccupied with themselves, and they try to prove that they are excellent lovers. And by doing that, preoccupation with the other person is less and less. Once again love... the best thing that you can do is not this time one-directional, but it comes head-on. And every time that it comes head-on, you have a lot of excitement, and lot of positive or negative discharge of emotion. If they are positively, they are trying to prove that each loves the person, you find tremendous excitement. If it is a negative causes, you find the other dimension of it, mainly the negative feelings and hurt feelings that come. But any love relationship has to go through these stages. So, many couples become practiced when they arrive at the level of competitive love. And many couples stay at that level for a long time. And even quite number of them, they decide that they don't love each other any longer and leave, and separate. Not knowing that they are involved in a love relationship, in the development of a love relationship, which is natural, which is to be tolerated and not to be so upset about it. So that is the second stage of a love relationship.

[23:50] Gradually, if the lovers allow them to come out of this stage, realize what is happening then they arrive in the third stage. The third stage of love relationship is the cooperative stage. It is the stage in which the forces of love of the husband and wife, are added to each other, rather than passing by as they did in the first stage, or flashing as they did in the second stage. In the third stage, the forces of love are added. Therefore, each person feels much greater degree of love than he or she would have been able to do alone. Because it is her love plus his and his love plus hers. Now, the issue of the cooperative type of love is an extremely important. One of the characteristics of a cooperative type of love is that you have to be able to give and receive. You have to be able both to be a good person in giving love and a good person in receiving love. As you know, many people have difficulty with this kind of situation. In our cultures, we have been trained and told that it really the best thing is to give, and not to expect that you should receive. So when people receive love, feel guilty. And when people give love and don't receive love, feel resentful. And they create profound levels of guilt in others. The phenomena of people who create guilt in others by giving love is enormous. Many children feel angry at their parents because the parent was a martyr-like individual who always gave and gave and gave, and never allowed anybody to give something back. But at the same time, they complain. They give you a sigh. They give you a face that you know the message, "Look how much I have sacrificed for you."

[26:33] Now, as a matter of fact it has been very difficult for humanity as a whole to come into grips with this kind of a love relationship. You see historically, the love relationship has been either: in a child-[?] form, namely one receiving, the other one giving; or in its adolescent form, mainly being in a state of competitive type of love. Even when you read some of the writings of the religions of the past, you would see that the same phenomenon occurred. God gives and gives and gives, and the individual receives and receives and receives. And this has been the prototype, in the minds of people, of a love relationship, which is primarily a parent-child relationship, with a superior-inferior type of relationship. It is very interesting for Baháʼís, for example, to realize that the nature of love relationship in the way that described in the Baháʼí faith is quite different. For the first time God is calling upon mankind, saying to him "grow up, I want to have a mature and adult type of relationship, love relationship with you." So Bahá’u’lláh says, "Love Me, so I may love thee." "Let's be equals here and see whether you can do it."

[28:18] Raise up and begin to relate to your God at that level, that highest level that you can. You see, people resent, in sometimes, that why should we give anything to God? God doesn't need it. Why should I pray to God? Why should do I this or that for God? God does not need... why He is asking these things? Not realizing that what is happening here is that it is a challenge to humanity to evolve, to grow. You know yourself, how proud you would feel, how marvelous you would feel if you were a student and your professor comes to you and says, "I want you to do something with me, not for me, with me. Let's do something together." You remember the big smile that you have, you walk direct, and you show off to everybody else, because you are [?] as a grown-up. You know you can remember the times that your parents when you were little would say, "Let's do a something together, a project." Okay? And when you do that you feel immensely great. Now imagine God coming to man, to humanity and said, "Let's do something together." This is the highest level of the relationship that one can reach. And it is at this level, this stage, that we are approaching now in the history of mankind. And because we are approaching the age of maturity of mankind, it is therefore necessary for us to learn how to love in a mature way. It is important for us to know what are the dimensions of this kind of cooperative type of love. "Love Me, so I may love thee" notion. Here, the preoccupation with self has to decrease. Here, we have to have several things that are essential for an adult cooperative type of love.

[31:01] The first thing that is essential is that the person should love himself or herself. You cannot love another person if you do not love yourself. But by loving yourself, I do not mean by being selfish. I do not mean being indulgent. I do not mean that you just think of yourself and nobody else. As we go to the next part of this presentation, you will see what I mean by love in general. One dimension of it is loving yourself. Many people have difficulty loving others because they: (a) do not feel that they are lovable, and (b) do not love themselves, and (c) do not allow anybody else to love them; they just simply don't and then blame everybody else. The second thing about difficulty of loving is that there is several human feelings that become a barrier between love of one individual and another individual. These are three sisters, these feelings, or three brothers, not to be sexist. These three brothers are anger, fear, and anxiety. Anger, fear, and anxiety usually always are together. And they become a barrier between your love and the other person. It is a barrier that doesn't allow your love to reach the other person. And therefore, it is important for people to learn how to deal with their feelings of anger, fear, and anxiety. We will talk about that on the lecture on anxiety and the crisis of life, but remember that this barrier exists. And because this barrier exists, then your love doesn't reach the other person. The other person's love doesn't reach you. It looks as though two individuals who really want to love each other, who really love each other are in kind of an invisible, kind of a protective environment, and neither love reaches the other person.

[34:05] Now, in the [?] relationship, the ultimate of a love relationship is the cooperative type of love. It is a kind of a love that requires two individuals on an equal basis, engaged in a human endeavor to relate to each other and establish a creative phenomenon between them. I say creative phenomenon because, you see, love is the cause of creation. It is through love that creation comes into existence. There are two ways of looking at this. First of all, you can look at love, again in the development sense, you can look at love in this way: that love is a force that unites everything that is created. Therefore, at the level of the mineral it manifests itself in the form of gravity and the forces of gravity that bring together the particles of atoms, and so forth. At the level of the mineral, everything that is there that stays together is because there is a force that keeps it together. You can think of that force in a metaphorical nature or in a real nature, as a force of love manifesting itself at that primitive level. At another level, that becomes manifest in the plant, and results in the plant, different dynamics of the plant growing, differing aspects of the growth of the plant, the harmony between the by-chemical processes that take place, and all of those things. That harmony, that coming together, is the love that results in the plant growing. The same phenomena on a much more profound level exist in animals and eventually, human beings.

[36:42] But in human beings, love also manifests itself in different ways. Love manifests itself in people loving each other, in people loving all other things and so forth as I described before. So love becomes much more complex, much more sophisticated, much more profound, much more all incasing than it was in the earlier stages of life. So love exists at all levels. And it is a force that causes creativity and creation. In the writings of the Baháʼí Faith, you read that God is talking to man and says, "I knew of My love for thee; therefore I created thee." Okay? Now that's very interesting because three important purposes are identified. One, the process of knowledge. If you want to love, you have to know who is it that you want to love. You cannot love that which you do not know. You cannot love if you do not know what is the object of your love. And that's so important in marriage, if you really want to love the other person you have to try to know the other person. And you have to try to know all of the positive qualities that the other person has, because ultimately what counts are the positive qualities, and not the negative qualities. It is the positive qualities of the other people that count.

[38:37] In yourself if you want to love yourself you have to know yourself. And what you have to know about yourself more than anything else are the positive qualities that you have. You can sit here and say, "I don't have this. I don't have that. I'm not a millionaire. I'm not the most handsome person in the universe. I'm not seven feet tall. I'm not this, I'm not that." Sure you are not, but that's not the point. The point is what you are, not what you are not. Most people when it comes to love focus on themselves about what they are not. I'm not lovable because I am not this way. I don't love my spouse because he's not that way. That's not the way to love, you love for what there is, not for what there is not. You cannot do that. And as you know, it is a fallacy to think that the negative qualities of people have a reality of their own. I tell you what I mean by that. You see, the negative qualities, we see them, we experience them, and we think that they are indeed having a reality of their own the same way that the positive qualities have a reality of their own. But there is another way of looking at them which is much closer to the truth of how things are. Mainly that the negative qualities that people have are simply absence of certain positive qualities. So the person who is obnoxious, really is because that person hasn't learned how to be polite. It is the politeness that is missing. The person who is unkind, what is missing is the capacity of being kind. So the focus instead of being you should do something about your being unkind, is you should do something to be more kind. It is much easier to work on yourself to become more kind, rather than to try to become less unkind. Because problems are enormous, immense if you are going to look at them. Doesn't matter how many problems you identify, there are more of them. But if you try to focus on the positive qualities of the other person, what is real about them, then the process of change is much easier, much nicer to feel and so forth.

[41:46] So going back to the issue of love. Therefore, at the level of cooperative love, we will become then aware that: (a) we have to love ourselves for what we are and the positive qualities that we have, and (b) love the other person for the same reason, and (c) begin to allow ourselves to get involved in the process of evolving that love further, which I will describe very soon. But before we go to the next stage, there is another stage of love that should be mentioned here. I mentioned three stages so far: one-directional love, competitive type of love, and cooperative type of love. And I said that cooperative type of love is the ideal type of love in the context of marriage relationships. But human beings, as they evolve and grow and mature, in their over-all relationship, they can achieve another stage of love which is called unconditional type of love. The unconditional type of love is a situation that only would come if the person has gone through the one-directional, the competitive, and the cooperative.

[43:38] I have seen many people who walk around and say, "Well, I have unconditional love." And they never have gone to that earlier stages, and by and large, these people you would see have difficulty even understanding the phenomenon of love. The best way I can describe unconditional love is like sunshine. You know, what the sun does, it shines over everything. The sun doesn't come out one morning and said, "Well, today, I'm not going to shine over that person because I don't like the color of the clothes that she has on." You see? Or saying that, "I like that person but really the hairdo is lousy today, better not shine on him so nobody will see." The sun wouldn't do that. Okay? The sun would shine over everyone. And it will show reality of people. It would show reality of the other person. In the context of unconditional love, the same thing happens. When you begin to love people unconditionally, you will see that some people respond to you positively, some people get mad at you, some people respond to you very negatively. And it is the reason for that process, is because that kind of a love relationship, without conditions attached to it like it is in the marriage and so for, without the contract that are between people, then people don't know what to do with that kind of a love. Because when you love them unconditionally if they are unable to love back sometimes they get upset. But that's all right, you just love and go. You don't need to do much. But the unconditional love is the level of love that the person becomes the lover of mankind. You become the lover of humanity. And at this level, the preoccupation with yourself is far far less than it is in all other levels. In other levels you always have to be, and rightly so, to one degree or another preoccupied with yourself, you have to be. But here that doesn't become necessary. Once again, I like to emphasize that in the context of the marital relationship, love is developmental. It goes from the one-directional love to the competitive stage to the cooperative stage. And it is the cooperative stage that you want to achieve.

[46:43] Let's look and see whether there are certain dimensions of love that we can understand and identify, kind of break down this phenomenon of love into different dimensions and to see whether we could identify with them in our own experiences. Again, the focus is marriage, okay? Usually the first dimension of love between two individuals, a man and a woman, let's say, is that they have attraction to one another. Two people, a man and woman, they come across each other, they look at each other, they like the way that the other person looks. They looked at shape of the nose, or toes, or knees, or whatever, and they fall in love. Said what happened? "Well I have fallen in love" they say. They become totally attracted toward one another. They see the other person as the most beautiful of all beauty. They cannot think of anybody else, or anything else. They have these pangs of yearning in their heart all the time. When they are away from the other person then they want to be with that person constantly. And its fantastic feeling. At the same time, it is very painful. Love is always accompanied by pain. Because any time that you're in love, on the one hand, there is the process of unity and union with your loved one. And on the other hand is the situation of separation and loss and the danger of rejection. And under those circumstances, pain is there. You either yearn to be with your beloved and you are full of pain that you're not, or when you are with your beloved, you become full of fear and anxiety that you are going to be separated and this love would go away. So at all times with love there is pain.

[49:28] Now, the love that is solely dependent upon the mutual attraction however, usually is a short-lived love because attraction is a very transitory phenomenon. Two individuals love each other and everything is fantastic, they get married, and then they discover all of the idiosyncrasies of the other person. The way that the person snores, the way that the person brushes his or her teeth, the way they use the toothpaste tube and what they do with it, the way that they do all kinds of things become so irritating that this original attraction suddenly becomes clouded with all kind of difficulties of this nature. And that's the reason that the love relationships that are primarily based, or solely based I should say, on mutual attraction gradually it loses its intensity. And there is another danger, and the danger is that you can come across somebody else that you would find more attractive. And then what? You're going to fall in love with this person? And fall out of love with that person? Yes, that's what exactly is happening in our society today. People are engaged in a kind of serial monogamy, in which they fall in love with one person, then leave that person, go to another person, and so forth. Okay?

[51:28] Then, there is the second dimension of love and that's mutual gratification. People fall in love with each other because they can allow each other to be satisfied, and satisfy the other person's so many needs. You see we all have needs. We have the need for somebody to tell us that we are beautiful, that we are lovable, that we are marvelous, that we are the best person in the world, that we are intelligent, that we are this and that, we need that. So somebody comes and says all of those things and some of those things, so we fall in love. Or the love can be based on the need because we are lonely and somebody becomes our companion, because we are afraid that nobody else would love us and therefore we accept the attention this one person, and so forth. The problem with this, the mutual gratification of the needs and the wants, is that the needs and the wants of people change. So while at one time, it was the most important thing for somebody to tell us that we were so beautiful, at another time, we don't need that any longer. We need somebody to acknowledge other qualities that we have. And if they are husband and wife therefore, their love was based on that initial mutual gratification, they would find their time very difficult with one another. In my observation, majority of the love relationships in the North American society are characterized by mutual attraction and/or mutual gratification. Most people fall in love based on these alone, and most people fall out of love because the love is limited to these two characteristics.

[53:49] Eventually, as the lovers begin to relate to each other, they need to experience another phenomenon. And the other phenomenon that they need to experience is mutual growth. You see, if you love something or somebody, you have to help that person to grow. You cannot love something and not allow it to grow, unless that thing is dead. If I love this plant I cannot put it under a cover, a huge let's say glass cover. Say I love it so much I want it to be protected, I don't want anything to come and hurt it, I put it here. So it dies. If you love a child and say, "I love my child so much I'm not going to wean him from breastfeeding, and I'm just going to just let him to lie there, I give him big bottles to drink, I love him so much. He would beg and I wouldn't want him to suffer pain. I don't want him to walk because he can fall down when he tries to walk. God forbid. So I'm going to love him by not allowing him to grow." You don't do that. What you do is exactly the opposite. What you do, you allow your child to experience pain of growth. And you allow him to experience pain of growth because you love him. You don't overprotect him from growth, rather you guide him to growth. If you don't do that, it doesn't grow.

[55:48] You know if you have a big apple tree and this apple tree is not pruned and is not allowed to cultivate itself, it grows but it grows to give you crap apple. It doesn't give you the McIntosh apple. The McIntosh apple requires pruning and pain that is necessary there. This is essential phenomenon, that we have to realize that accompanying love at all times is the pain of growth. And the husbands and wives, therefore, have to be very aware of this process. So if I want to love myself, I have to help myself grow and allow my spouse to help me to grow, and the other way around has to happen. Okay? Now what happens if we begin to grow in the love relationship? What would happen is that the mutual gratification that we had gradually would give way to another phenomenon, and that is a mutual purpose. You see, in life we have goals and then we have a purpose. You can have many objectives in life. And as you know, whenever you have a mutual objective you feel very close to each other and you feel in love. For example, if you are going to build a house, let's say, you go and work very hard, day and night. You don't see hardly each other at all. You suffer quite a bit, but you feel so close to each other because you have a mutual goal that you are working on it. And you feel very great that you have that mutual goal. You feel in love. And then you move into the house and begin fighting. You begin to fight. Why? Because no longer have a goal. Okay? Then you set another goal. You say, "Let's have children." Many couples have difficulties in their marriage, in their love relationship, they say "let's have a child", thinking that the child is a marriage counselor and will come and improve their marriage. And to their surprise, the children don't know anything about marriage counselling. They are actually very lousy at it, you know. But nevertheless, it's become a goal, a mutual goal for them. Whose going to get up tonight? And you know what they do? They both get up, at the beginning. Later on they learn that it's not necessary. But there is a mutuality in all they do and consequently, they are close to each other. Okay? However, these limited goals, however important they are, they are not sufficient. What is necessity is a purpose in life, a meaning for life, the ultimate purpose. And it is toward that ultimate purpose that they have to focus their love, their yearning. And what is the ultimate purpose of marriage? The ultimate purpose of marriage is unity. Unity has to become the ultimate purpose of the marriage. And therefore the mutual gratification would give way to mutual purpose. We shall work together to accomplish ever-higher degrees of unity. And when I talked about unity, I am talking about two levels. First of all, unity within ourselves as people so that you have a unity of heart and you have a unity of man and unity of action, united in yourself through those three processes. And then you have unity between each other, these will be your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

[1:00:34] There is a final stage that this growth will do, is that the mutual attraction gradually has to give way to a mutual point of attraction. It is very difficult for a husband and wife to remain attracted to the qualities of themselves. Because however marvelous we are, nevertheless we are not perfect. And we have all kind of things that are bothersome. The ultimate attraction, you see the human heart is attracted only to what is the best, to the highest, the most marvelous, the most magnificent. And that is only God-given, nothing else. Therefore, through the phenomenon of growth, the couple gradually would realize that they can see the beauty in each other as those that have been created by God, and they would try to discover the beauty of the other person. You see, what people usually do, they say, "I see so many faults, so many mistakes." The role of the individuals in the marriage has to be, the goal and the role that they have to have, is to make conscious attempts to discover the beauty of the other person that God has put in the other person. Many a time, our anger, our fears, our anxieties, our frustration, our resentment do not allow us to do so. We become mesmerized by the negative qualities of that person. We lose our attraction. And that's the reason that the only way that you can be attracted to one another is to the realization that this person has been created by God. He is a noble being. He is a created being, a unique being. And you truly would find all magnificent qualities in them, if you only trust.