The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again. Eclipsed as they may be in the gross appreciation of the World by other people, who excel in this and that accomplishment, individuals that nourish Nice Feelings and are intimate with the Fine Shames carry their own test of intrinsic value. Whatever may be the evils resulting from a too susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an insensible one. Though the scripture obliges me to remain contented, it does not enjoin me to shut my eyes to my own merit, nor restrain me from seeing when I am injured by an unjust comparison. When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. Our proverbs want rewriting. They were made in Winter, and it is Summer now, or at least it feels like it is. Young people of both genders are not in a position to view a larger proportion of the facts, about marriage and extra-marital affairs manifestations, than were open to the generations preceding them, and they are acquiring the courage to act in accordance with the facts. That means many mistakes are being made, for the deepest facts of the sensual life can only be learnt by experience, and experience can only come slow. However, it is perhaps better to make the mistakes of facing life than to make the mistakes of running away from life. For those mistakes may enrich and enlighten, while these are apt to prove futile. The paths of the sensual life are beset by difficulties; but so is the whole life. If we are to live in any true sense at all we are compelled to live precariously.  

A large proportion of the men and women of to-day form extra-marital affairs—whether or not they ultimately lead to marriage—which they conceal, or seek to conceal, from the World, this has always been so; what is new is the attitude taken towards such relationships, leading to the conception of the companionate marriage, that is, an openly acknowledged and recognizable relationship less binding than ordinary marriage, through liable to become ordinary marriage should children be born. This conception has not been put forward as a method of relaxing morals, but rather of supporting them, since the open recognition of a kind of relationship which already exists secretly on a large scale cannot but be a steadying and ennobling influence. The preceding considerations represent conditions which are modifying marriages in our Western civilization. However, they are far from overthrowing marriage or threatening the life of the family. On the contrary, they help to strengthen them. It is the rigid institution that is broken; the institution that cannot change is dying. By its flexibility and its adaptation to changing conditions, the family reveals its power of growth. However, marriage, it may once more be repeated, rests fundamentally on biological instincts and the facts of constitutional organization; it is not strictly an institution. When I wanted to go upstairs, there was my spouse coming down; or when my spouse wanted to go down, there I was coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it. 

Study your spouse closely for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good mate does not exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you, –you have married a monster. The flexibility and the adaptation are limited, and if they sometime seem extreme, that is simply because we happen to be dealing with individual cases of constitutional variation, such as we can statistically estimate. Even in Soviet Russia, where the legal flexibility of intimate unions has been carried to an extent unusual in the European World, the fundamental facts of human nature remain the same as well as the ordinary human valuations of those facts. Do you know many spouses who respect and admire their mate? And yet they are their husbands get on very well. How many individuals go to the altar with hearts that would bear inspection by the men who take them there? And yet it does not end unhappily—somehow or other the nuptial establishes jogs on. There are two types of spouses: The monandric individual, who is only drawn into serious relationships with one person, and the polyandric individual, who tends to form numerous relationships with others, either successively or simultaneously. It is found that people who abstain from extra-marital affairs are nearly twice as numerous as the polyandric spouse. You have been inoculated for marriage, and have recovered. If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true matchmaking sometimes does so.

 The Winchester Mystery House

Cross through the iron gates and traverse the beautiful Victorian garden to discover the mysterious stories and dramatic Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/