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Four Ounces of Joy

Dear Jack, a good marriage is more important to a man than a young man can ever fathom. A lack of appreciation of this simple fact has unfortunately sent many men to the psychiatry ward, some to early death. As a man you need peace at home. Ambient peace. Without atmospheric peace your soul will be troubled. And when your soul is troubled your energy level will drop, which then affects the energy available for you to succeed.
We tend to think of energy only in terms of physical energy, but energy requirement cuts across the three dimensions of man. Man is three-dimensional: he’s spirit, he has a soul, he lives in a body. Physical energy relates to the physical body. You can eat an average energy bar to get that kind of energy. There’s of course spiritual energy – the ability to marshal resources from another dimension through prayer. But soul energy is crucial. When that energy base is depleted the body begins to malfunction. The soul controls the body. And soul energy cannot be synthesized outside of peace. You need peace at home for your mental and emotional health. A quiet home is not necessarily a peaceful home. A home can be quiet because it’s running on a system of confrontational avoidance. It doesn’t mean there’s peace.

A lack of verbal altercation must not be confused with peace in marriage. Unhappiness is lack of soul peace. We suffuse our environment with what is inside of us. An embittered spouse will radiate toxic energy into the environment. There need not be fight as traditionally understood. When you enter such a home you can feel tension in the air; you can feel hatred, malice, unforgiveness… All that toxic stuff is coming from the insides of the parties dwelling in that house. It’s not coming from the air-conditioner. We leak what is inside of us. Man is a radioactive energy concept. He is embedded with nature’s equivalence of Wi-Fi and has extraordinary sensory mechanism. It’s how you know someone is staring at you from the back… Why you can sense someone’s feelings towards you.

And so a marriage full of rancor and bitterness is one in which the parties are generating rancour and bitterness. An adaptation of the Pauline truism holds true: As much as lies within you, live at peace with your spouse. Marital peace is not balance of terror. Ultimately that’s balance of error. The peace I’m talking about is loving peace – the type that makes a man want to come home always. Now you understand why I will ask parties to re-evaluate the march towards matrimony if there’s constant bickering. If there’s so much disagreement in a relationship that’s an incubator of pain and anger being developed.

The philosophy of marriage as a difficult and painful enterprise is not something you should buy into. There are loving marriages. Make those your model, not the bitter and painful ones. Some people develop and proclaim philosophies of painful marital experiences as de facto definition of marriage. When a home is full of love, a man’s heart is suffused in a surfeit of other-worldly medium. A happily married man has an incredible store of energy, and it’s not physically sourced. Don’t let anyone deceive you, happiness is important in marriage. The opposite is depression. And when a man is depressed and he can’t see the way out of his situation he’s depressed even further. Don’t marry someone you can’t be happy with, someone you can’t be yourself with. In some ways therefore those who say marry your friend are right.

And that’s another thing you need to pay attention to: friendship is important in marriage. You and your wife should be friends. Be careful about marrying someone who just wants to marry in order to erase social shame; who doesn’t love you. After the prefix “Mrs.” is obtained, mission is accomplished and the marriage is essentially over. Social status attained. So peace, happiness and friendship are important but there’s a fourth thing you must pay attention to. It’s called love.

Marry someone you love. Marry someone who loves you. If you marry someone who doesn’t love you, you’ll experience pain and anguish. You will have a lingering unfulfilled desire that creates an ache so deep you stop feeling. That’s how you become a marital zombie, perfunctorily going through life like it’s some mechanical chore. Pain can be so deep it cannot be expressed in words. And because marital pain cannot be expressed in words society is inured to the deep feelings of an unhappy spouse.

And if you marry an unhappy person you’ve married a problem you can’t solve. The unhappiness predates the marriage but the marriage will be credited as the source of the unhappiness. Such a person will drag your energy level down, deplete the energy in your soul. You will become ill. When people complain of constant tiredness and lack of energy, sometimes it’s unhappiness in marriage.

And so these four things are important in marriage: love, peace, happiness, friendship. Without love marriage is not worth it. Why go into such a powerful life construct without love. The God who franchised the concept of love to mankind knew what he was doing. Love is a universal medium. As per friendship, why, that is the love of delight! Friendship makes you be yourself in marriage. Friendship makes you look forward to going home to gist with someone. You delight in each other’s company. Friendship is what makes you want to go out with that special someone always. It’s important for couples to hunger for each other, to want each other, to want to be with each other. And if anybody tells you these are unattainable ideals, wish him luck in the pursuit of cynical unhappiness.

Your mentor, LA

© Leke Alder | talk2me@lekealder.com

Tags : Peace, Love, Happiness, Joy

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