ok.

The next serious hurdle is tears. Tears are easily mistaken for the distress due to
sadness, and they are very effective at bringing tenderhearted people to a dead halt as
a
consequence of their misplaced compassion. (Why misplaced? Because if you leave
the
person alone because of their tears, they quit suffering right then, but continue with
their unresolved problem until they solve it, which might be never.) Tears, however,
are
just as often anger (perhaps more often) as they are sadness or distress. If the person
you are chasing down and cornering is red-faced, for example, in addition to their
tears,
then he or she is probably angry, not hurt (that is not inevitably the case, but it is a
reasonably common sign). Tears are an effective defense mechanism, as it takes a
heart
of stone to withstand them, but they tend to be the last-ditch attempt at avoidance. If
you can get past tears, you can have a real conversation, but it takes a very
determined
interlocutor to avoid the insult and hurt generated by anger (defense one) and the
pity
and compassion evoked by tears (defense two). It requires someone who has
integrated
their shadow (their stubbornness, harshness, and capacity for necessary emotionless
implacability) and can use it for long-term benefit. Do not foolishly confuse “nice”
with
“good.”
Remember the options previously discussed: negotiation, tyranny, or slavery. Of
those, negotiation is the least awful, even though it is no joke to negotiate, and it is
perhaps the most difficult of the three, in the short term, because you have to fight it
out, now, and God only knows how deep you are going to have to go, how much
diseased
tissue you will have to remove. For all you know, you are fighting with the spirit of
your
wife’s grandmother, who was treated terribly by her alcoholic husband, and the
consequences of that unresolved abuse and distrust between the sexes are echoing
down
the generations. Children are amazing mimics. They learn much of what they know
implicitly long before they can use language, and they imitate the bad along with the
good. It is for this reason that it has been said that the sins of the fathers will be
visited
on the children to the third and fourth generation (Numbers 14:18).
Hope, of course, can drive us through the pain of negotiation, but hope is not enough.
You need desperation, as well, and that is part of the utility of “till death do us part.”
You
are stuck with each other, if you are serious—and if you are not serious, you are still a
child. That is the point of the vow: the possibility of mutual salvation, or the closest
you
can manage here on Earth. In a truly mature marriage, if your health holds out, you
are
there for the aforementioned sixty years, like Moses in the desert searching for the
Promised Land, and there is plenty of trouble that must be worked through—all of it
—
before peace might be established. So, you grow up when you marry, and you aim for
peace as if your soul depends upon it (and perhaps that is more serious than your life
depending on it), and you make it work or you suffer miserably. You will be tempted
by
avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to employ the trapdoor of divorce so that you
will
not have to face what must be faced. But your failure will haunt you while you are
enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship
you
stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not
improved a whit.
You can keep the possibility of escape in the back of your mind. You can avoid th