Alain de Botton takes a sledgehammer to the notions of romanticism that spawn unrealistic expectations in relationships which eventually lead to disillusionment and painful parting.
Tag: Relationships
Rilke and the Labors of Love
Rilke stresses the importance of work in relationship and cautions against the youthful fancy that romance is the domain of play and pleasure.
Lori Rottenberg – Heresy
Lori Rottenberg wrote her poem, Heresy, when her children were young and she was a stay-at-home mom.
Jack Gilbert – Failing and Flying
Fearing future outcomes should not stop us from pouring ourselves fully into today. As Jack Gilbert reminds us: 'Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.'
Don’t Hit Your Head, Just Pass Through the Door
Osho on how clinging to a particular idea of love can make a marriage stale and how chasing after security can dampen the dynamic beauty of being in a constantly changing world.
David Rosenheim – Pineapple Sage
Pineapple Sage was written in David Rosenheim's 'postage-stamp-sized back garden, which he says, 'continues to unfold as a canvas for close inspection.'
Margaret Atwood – Habitation
Using the stark language of cold glaciers and barren deserts, Margaret Atwood paints a picture of marriage as something that survives on the very peripheries of primitive forces and natural epics. Not a house or even a tent, it's a place where we are 'learning to make fire', as though we are still in the very first and most primal stages of the endeavor.Â
William Stafford – A Ritual to Read to Each Other
We must endeavor to rise above the patterns set out for us by others, according to Stafford, and not follow in a line like elephants holding each other's tails; it is imperative, he writes, that 'awake people be awake' since 'the darkness around us is deep'.
True Relations in a False Age – Ralph Waldo Emerson on Friendship
For the former Unitarian minister, relations with other people evoke in us the call towards both truth and tenderness, asking at their highest level not for daintiness, but for the 'roughest courage.
Tria Chang – I Was Once in Love
Tria Chang's poem, I Was Once in Love, talks about the possibilities and pitfalls of relationships and how things can so easily slip out of balance.