l because it
is shared. However hard and dreary experience becomes, it is more so if
one walks alone and less so if its testing is met by two who travel
onward in love. Monotony is always a reflection of inner losses. So long
as we are alive to what is, so long as we have the feelings that uncover
the zestfulness of things, we keep out of the desert. Monogamy cannot
guarantee enthusiastic living, but undoubtedly, by encouraging mutual
love, it protects the roots from which most of all each of us draws
vitality.

When the relationship becomes monotonous, there is the same confession
of failure as when day-by-day happenings grow stale and repellent. The
difference is that when love goes, the fortress has been taken and all
life flattens out.

The exclusiveness of monogamic fellowship, the out-coming of the deep
hunger for a unique experience in affection, can be greatly
misinterpreted by failing to see that it is human nature's effort to
keep to the golden mean as one is driven by tremendous impulses toward
the supreme man-woman comradeship. In all such relationships there is on
one side the extreme which shows itself when one member of the intimacy
crushes and destroys the personality of the other. This eventually
spoils the union by making it a conquest of one by the other. The
opposite disaster appears when there is no fusion at all but merely an
alliance of two independent, self-centered persons who come together in
the spirit of temporary self-interest and refuse to develop a common
life. Even when they maintain the letter of the monogamic code, they
lose its spirit.

In contrast with these unfortunates, victims of will-to-power and
self-centered passion, those in monogamic fellowship enlarge the life
they share. One often notices, as did Hudson, the naturalist, in his
description of the English shepherd's home, that husband and wife reach
such understanding that they share feeling without recourse to words;
and gather so much in common that as they travel through the years they
do, indeed, seem to grow even to look like each other. They winter and
summer together, and when time sends the children to their own
adventures, we hear these life-tested lovers, hand in hand, saying:

"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made."

Index

Acquiescence, 102, 109

Adjustments, marital, 9-11, 16, 104-110

Adolescence, 119, 158

Adopted children