WHAT LIFE COULD MEAN TO YOU (Timeless Wisdom Collection Book 196)

by Alfred Adler

We take one impression and use it to justify a whole series of actions. We draw consequences from it and act as if the consequences were obvious facts.

We shall generally find that anyone who dislikes something as much as this chooses a reason for his dislike, selects something from his experiences to bear the whole burden of justifying it.

We shall accomplish nothing by reproaching him.

Every suicide is a reproach;

because he sees its purpose can be found out;

Attitudes like this could be provoked anew with every child. We need only give the child a mother to pamper it, as this mother did; and a father who is harsh, as this father was.

If we are trying, therefore, to come to a right conclusion, our approach must be quite without prejudice. We must forget what we have learned and try to investigate, as far as we can, without letting other considerations interfere with a full and free discussion.

I do not mean that we can judge the problem of love and marriage as if it were an entirely isolated problem. A human being can never be wholly free in this way: he can never reach solutions for his problems purely along the line of his private ideas. Every human being is bound by definite ties; his development takes place within a definite framework and he must conform his decisions to this framework. These three main ties are set by the facts that we are living in one particular place in the universe and must develop with the limits and possibilities which our circumstances set us; that we are living among others of our own kind to whom we must learn to adapt ourselves; and that we are living in two sexes with the future of our race dependent on the relations of these two sexes.

It is easy to understand that if an individual is interested in his fellows and in the welfare of mankind, everything he does will be guided by the interests of his fellows, and he will try to solve the problem of love and marriage as if the welfare of others were involved. He does not need to know that he is trying to solve it in this way. If you ask him, he will perhaps be unable to give a scientific account of his aims. But he will spontaneously seek the welfare and improvement of mankind and this interest will be visible in all his activities.

"What can I contribute to my fellows?” "How can I fit in as part of the whole?”,

“What is the use of life? What can I get out of it? What does it pay? Are other people considering me enough? Am I properly appreciated?”

Love is not a purely natural task, as some psychologists believe. Sex is a drive or instinct; but the question of love and marriage is not quite simply how we are to satisfy this drive. Wherever we look, we find that our drives and instincts are developed, cultivated, refined. We have repressed some of our desires and inclinations. On behalf of our fellow beings, we have learned how not to annoy each other. We have learned how to dress ourselves and how to be clean. Even our hunger does not have a merely natural outlet; we have cultivated tastes and manners in eating. Our drives have all been adapted to our common culture; they all reflect the efforts we have learned to make for the welfare of mankind and for our life in association.

If each partner is to be more interested in the other partner than in himself, there must be equality. If there is to be so intimate a devotion, neither partner can feel subdued nor overshadowed. Equality is only possible if both partners have this attitude. It should be the effort of each to ease and enrich the life of the other. In this way each is safe. Each feels that he is worthwhile: each feels that he is needed.

It is not possible for a partner in a cooperative task to accept a position of subservience. Two people cannot live together fruitfully if one wishes to rule and force the other to obey. In our present conditions many men and, indeed, many women are convinced that it is the man's part to rule and dictate, to play the leading role, to be the master. This is the reason why we have so many unhappy marriages. Nobody can bear a position of inferiority without anger and disgust. Comrades must be equal, and when people are equal, they will always find a way to settle their difficulties.

the children of unhappy marriages are penalized and cannot develop well.

It will be easily understood that where we get two people living together in the intimate way which marriage demands, any failure in cooperation, in the ability to be interested in somebody else, will have the gravest results.

No crisis of adult life is met without previous training: we always respond in conformity with our style of living.

When children give such early evidence of their interest in the other sex and choose for themselves the partners whom they like, we should never interpret it as a mistake, or a nuisance, or a precocious sex influence. Still less should we deride it or make a joke of it. We should take it as a step forward in their preparation for love and marriage. Instead of making a trifle out of it, we should rather agree with the child that love is a marvelous task, a task for which he should be prepared, a task on behalf of the whole of mankind. Thus we can implant an ideal in the child's mind, and later in life children will be able to meet each other as very well-prepared comrades and as friends in an intimate devotion.

I should never encourage parents to explain the physical relations of sex too early in life or to explain more than their children wish to learn. You can understand that the way in which a child looks on the problems of marriage is of the greatest importance. If he is taught in a mistaken way, he can see them as a danger or as something altogether beyond him. In my own experience children who were introduced to the facts of adult relations in early life, at four, five or six years of age, and children who had precocious experiences, are always more scared of love in later life. Bodily attraction suggests to them also the idea of danger. If a child is more grown-up when he has his first explanations and experiences, he is not nearly so frightened: there is so much less opportunity for him to make mistakes in understanding the right relations.

The key to helpfulness is never to lie to a child, never to evade his questions, to understand what is behind his questions, to explain only as much as he wishes to learn and only as much as we are sure he can understand. Officious and intrusive information can cause great harm. In this problem of life, as in all others, it is better for a child to be independent and learn what he wants to know by his own efforts. If there is trust between himself and his parents he can suffer no injury. He will always ask what he needs to know. There is a common superstition that children can be misled by the explanations of their comrades. I have never seen a child, otherwise healthy, who suffered harm in this way.

Children do not swallow everything that their schoolmates tell them: for the most part they are very critical, and, if they are not certain that what they have been told is true, they will ask their parents or their brothers and sisters. I must confess, too, that I have often found children more delicate and tactful in these affairs than their elders.

Our aesthetic emotions are always based on a feeling for health and for the improvement of mankind. All our functions, all our abilities, are formed in this direction. We cannot escape it. We know as beautiful those things which look towards eternity, those things which are for the benefit of mankind and for the future of mankind; the symbols of the way in which we wish our children to develop. This is the beauty which is always drawing us.

We are always better prepared if the marriage of our parents has been harmonious. Children gain their earliest impression of what marriage is like from the life of their parents; and it is not astonishing that the greatest number of failures in life are among the children of broken marriages and unhappy family life. If the parents are not able themselves to cooperate, it will be impossible for them to teach cooperation to their children. We can often best consider the fitness of an individual for marriage by learning whether he was trained in the right kind of family life and by observing his attitude towards his parents, sisters and brothers. The important factor is where he gained his preparation for love and marriage. We must be careful on this point, however. We know that a man is not determined by his environment but by the estimate he makes of his environment. His estimate can be useful. It is possible that he had very unhappy experiences of family life in his parents' home but this may only stimulate him to do better in his own family life. He may be striving to prepare himself well for marriage. We must never judge or exclude a human being because he has an unfortunate family life behind him.

The worst preparation is when an individual is always looking for his own interest. If he has been trained in this way, he will be thinking all the while what pleasure or excitement he can get out of life. He will always be demanding freedom and reliefs, never considering how he can ease and enrich the life of his partner.

In preparing our attitude to love, therefore, we should not always be looking for mitigations and ways of avoiding responsibility. The comradeship of love could not be firm if there were hesitation and doubt. Cooperation demands a decision for eternity; and we only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. In this decision we include the decision to have children, to educate them and train them in cooperation, and to make them, as far as we can, real fellow men, real equal and responsible members of the human race. A good marriage is the best means we have for bringing up the future generation of mankind; and marriage should always have this in view. Marriage is really a task; it has its own rules and laws; we cannot select one part and evade the others without infringing the eternal law of this earth crust, cooperation.

A child who has been pampered at home often feels neglected in marriage.

A pampered child may develop into a great tyrant in marriage; the other partner feels victimized, feels himself in a cage, and begins to resist.

The next step is to look for an escape; one partner begins a flirtation with someone else in the hope of gaining more attention.

Some people are incapable of falling in love with one person; they must fall in love with two at the same time. They thus feel free; they can escape from one to the other, and never undertake the full responsibilities of love.

There are other people who invent a romantic, ideal or unattainable love; they can thus luxuriate in their feelings without the necessity of approaching a partner in reality. A high ideal of love can also be used to exclude all possibilities, because no one will be found who can live up to it. Many men, and especially many women, through mistakes in their development, have trained themselves to dislike and reject their sexual role. They have hindered their natural functions and are physically not capable, without treatment, of accomplishing a successful marriage. This is what I have called the Masculine Protest and it is very much provoked by the overvaluation of men in our present culture. If children are left in doubt of their sexual role, they are very apt to feel insecure. So long as the masculine role is taken to be the dominant role, it is natural that they should feel, whether they are boys or girls, that the masculine role is enviable. They will doubt their own ability to fulfill this role, will overstress the importance of being manly, and will try to avoid being put to the test. This dissatisfaction with the sexual role is very frequent in our culture. We can suspect it in all cases of frigidity in women and psychic impotence in men. In these cases there is a resistance to love and marriage and a resistance in the right place. It is impossible to avoid these failures unless we truly have the feeling that men and women are equal; and so long as one half of the hum...

when they choose partners who are drunkards or very far below them in social status or in education. They are afraid of love and marriage and wish to establish a situation in which their partner will look up to them.

One of the ways in which social interest can be trained is through friendship.

Training in friendship is a preparation for marriage. Garnes might be useful if they were regarded as a training in cooperation;

It is very useful to establish situations in which two children work together, study together and learn together.

The sexual attraction towards the other partner is necessary but it should always be molded along the line of a desire for human welfare.

We shall find, therefore, that in this problem of love and marriage those people who are most spontaneously interested in the welfare of mankind are the most likely to have children, and those who are not interested, consciously or unconsciously, in their fellow beings, refuse the burden of procreation. If they are always demanding and expecting, never giving, they do not like children. They are interested in only their own persons and they regard children as a bother, a trouble, a nuisance; something that will prevent them from keeping their interest in themselves. We can say, therefore, that for a full solution of the problem of love and marriage a decision to have children is necessary. A good marriage is the best means we know for bringing up the future generation of mankind, and marriage should always have this in view.

These breaks generally happen because the partners are not collecting all their powers: they are not creating the marriage: they are only waiting to receive something.

It is a mistake to regard love and marriage as if they were a paradise; and it is a mistake, too, to regard marriage as if it were the end of a story. It is when two people are married that the possibilities of their relationship begin; it is during marriage that they are faced with the real talks of life and the real opportunity to create for the sake of society.

love by itself does not settle everything. There are all kinds of love, and it is better to rely upon work, interest, and cooperation to solve the problems of marriage.

They make themselves sick and neurotic and out of their mistaken style of life they construct a philosophy.

Some of them, perhaps, still feel that if they cry long enough, if they protest enough, if they refuse cooperation, they will obtain their own desires.

We cannot look on love and marriage as a remedy for a criminal career, for drunkenness or neurosis. A neurotic needs to have the right treatment before he is fitted for love and marriage; and if he enters them before he is capable of approaching them rightly, he is bound to run into new dangers and misfortunes.

marriage is entered into with inappropriate aims. Some people marry for the sake of economic security; they marry because they pity someone; or they marry to secure a servant. There is no place for such jokes in marriage.

From all we have said we can draw a simple, obvious and helpful conclusion. Human beings are neither polygamous nor monogamous. The fact that we live on this planet, in association with human beings equal to ourselves, and divided into two sexes, and the fact that we must solve the three problems of life which our circumstances set us in a sufficient way, will help us to see that the fullest and highest development of the individual in those and marriage can best be secured by monogamy.