دانلود رمان انگلیسی “ازدواج آگاهانه”

It was, perhaps, the wisest statement ever made to us about the marriage relationship. Dr. Carl Whitaker, the well-known clinician and one of the founders of the field of marriage and family therapy, and I were scheduled to do a keynote for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1991—I as a young man of thirty-three years and married for a decade; Carl, eighty years old and married for fifty-three years. During the frenetic lunch when we were supposed to be talking about aging and the family, Carl blurted out, “You know Terry, I love my wife, Muriel.” Stunned, because the comment came totally out of the blue, I said haltingly, “Well, that is great, Carl.” He went on. “But you know, as much as I would miss Muriel if she died, what I would miss more is what we are together.” There it was. The defining moment of our marriage, for our coupleness and for our relationship. It is what Carl used to refer to as “we-ness,” what we have come to call “usness.” Usness, in short, is what we are together. In other words, marriage is not about two people learning how to manage together and build a life together. It is not about meeting each other’s needs and accomplishing tasks. It is not even about loving each other as individuals. Though a marriage is all of that, what Carl rocked us with that day was a new understanding of the essence of marriage as two people creating a whole new person—a whole new identity. An invisible but real “us.” There is a Terry. There is a Sharon. And then there is what we are together. There is us. It is important to realize we are not talking about a concept or an opinion. Us is a real, living being much in the same way the church is real and is the combined invisible entity of Jesus and His followers. In a way, the perfect metaphor for us is our children. Each of our children inherited half of their chromosomes from Sharon and half from Terry. When those chromosomes are combined in the magic of conception, the child becomes a whole new human being. Sure, our children and our usness have characteristics that are similar to both Terry and Sharon, but there is no doubt our children and our us have their own individual beings with their own personalities, likes and dislikes and patterns of growth. More than anything else, caring for our marriage is like caring for a child. The two parents think first about the needs and well-being of the child long before they consider their own needs and wants. The same is true for our usness. Parents lavish their child with encouragement, nurture, and resources even though the child does not have the know-how or the inkling to do the same for the parents. The same is true for our usness. And most important, when the child falls short, disappoints, or fails, the parents align themselves with love, safety, and forgiveness to grow and patiently try again with the child. The same is true for our usness. The great conservative columnist George Will once said, “Biologically, adults produce children. Spiritually, children produce adults. Most of us do not grow up until we have helped children to do so. Thus, the generations form a braided cord.” The same is true for our usness.