In order to reduce the divorce rate and ensure that married couples rise above any argument, conflict, and crisis, we need to revise the way we are educated and influenced.
As we grow up, we need to learn what it means to live as members of a happy family, how to run our family life optimally, and how to overcome any kinds of conflicts that arise.
The key principle to successfully running a family can be found in the Bible story about our creation—that one man was originally created and then divided into two. How, then, can two separate beings connect as one? The answer is in mutual concession.
Each partner should know that they can each achieve much more in life if they are positively connected, and that a solitary life would be a lot tougher.
Concession involves conceding our egos to our spouses. Our egos are our desires to personally benefit at the expense of others. Therefore, by conceding our egos, we undergo corrections of this ego, and acquire a positive form of love, bestowal and connection in its place. Our egos then become impulses that help us positively connect. That is, when we recognize our egos rejecting the tendency to connect, precisely at such points we can exercise our concessions and develop loftier qualities of love and bestowal upon our egoistic drives.
By doing so, we advance faster and more consciously to our life’s purpose: to become a human being in the fullest sense of the term, i.e., where “human” (“Adam”) comes from the phrase “similar to the most high” (“Adameh le Elyon”) in Kabbalah, or in other words, resemblance to the Creator—the quality of love, bestowal and connection that fills the entirety of reality outside of us. By acquiring such a quality, we enter into the state of eternity and perfection.
Therefore, in order for marriage to work, we should apply a higher goal to the marriage: that it serves as a kind of laboratory in order to exercise our relations of love, bestowal and positive connection above all the arguments, conflicts, and crises that surface.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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