A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Read Online Free

gentle heart involves a sense of responsibility to the person. If that is not there, you have not got love, you’ve got something else. If that is there, it will last. Lust doesn’t, no responsibility there. In marriages that go when the children go, the parents’ sense of responsibility was to the children, not to each other, and when that was gone, the link was gone.
    Before there are any children or even before there is a marriage, the crucial question is: “Is this the gentle heart?” Is the person seeking a possession? Or is the person feeling a responsibility to the one with whom the relationship is taking place? If there is feeling of responsibility, then I think you are in danger.
    What I am saying is, not that responsibility constitutes love, but that love without a sense of responsibility is not love. It’s taking possession. Are you trying to possess somebody? Or are you in a relationship?
    Talking about what one has done in one’s own life, I wouldn’t have thought of marrying anyone unless, in committing myself to the marriage, I understood that I was taking that person’s life in my hands. I can’t under-stand that other feeling of possessing somebody. It is a failure to take responsibility for what the hell you are doing. One can have love affairs and all the weeping that goes on in all that, but that is very different from moving into a marriage.
    In the first place, you have to know what you are doing. I think a lot of people don’t know what they are doing, and they don’t know what they’re doing to that other person. If you don’t have the maturity to control your compulsive passions, it seems to me that you are ineligible for marriage. I think what I am saying probably comes from my Catholic upbringing. In Catholicism, marriage is a destiny decision.
    Beyond that, there was an omen in our marriage. I had a little twenty-dollar-a-year house in Woodstock, on a road called Maverick Road. We were driving up there for our honeymoon, and as we approached that road, a hearse came from the other side and drove before us. I had never seen a hearse in that neighborhood, and I read the omen as meaning we would be together until death. There it was.
    What I see in marriage, then, is a real identification with that other person as your responsibility, and as the one whom you love. Committing yourself to anyone, turning your destiny over to a dual destiny, is a life commitment. To lose your sense of responsibility to the person who has given you that commitment because something comes along that enables you to think, “I'd like to fly off in this direction and forget that which has already been committed”—this is not marriage. I do not think you are married unless your relationship to your spouse has primary consideration in your life. It’s got to be top.
    Compulsive erotic relationships can break in on this. One is not in perfect control of oneself. I don’t mean that everything outside of the marriage is lust. It can be love also. When you cut off a love that comes to you outside of marriage, you have cut off a part of yourself in the marriage.
    But then you have the problem of relating with responsibility to that love affair and to the marriage that you’ve already got as your prime relationship, and that is not an easy thing to do. You have to develop a number of different ways of relating to people, not just one. Sometimes, if there is a mutual sense of the nature of the relationship and its value, then something can be worked out; but I would understand that, no matter what happened, the marriage would have to come back together again. It’s prime. It’s number one.
    If the marriage is toxic, you have to decide whether there is a possibility of transforming the situation. If you feel that there can be a transformation, then you can go through the ordeal of effecting one. You can exert the necessary energy on the other to effect the transformation. That is to say, you can, as a kind of