The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

Over time, the argument for marriage has shifted. It’s no longer about external forces having power over us: religions, the state, the legal idea of legitimacy, the social idea of being respectable … What we are correctly now focused on is the psychological point of making it hard to throw in the towel. It turns out that we benefit greatly (though

Yet it is a given of life that nothing is permanently and finally satisfying. Despite this fact, many of us believe that somewhere there is a person or thing that will be permanently satisfying. Such a chimerical belief, and the restless, desperate seeking that follows from it, can become deeply disheartening and self-defeating. In mindfulness we c

I’m lonely, so I get married, and then I’m always fighting with my husband or my wife, so I start another love affair, and then my wife or husband threatens to leave me and I’m caught in the confusion of what to do next, and on and on and on.

Faith commitments call for trust in an invisible source of nurturance, and when visible sources of nurturance have let us down, we are less likely to trust the invisible sources. Yet Jung says the longing for the spiritual is as strong in us as the desire for sex. We therefore ignore an inner instinct when we totally deny the possibility of a power