Chapter 2: How the Home Can Succeed 2. Helping Each Other

As the mates help and strengthen each other they strengthen the home. The various mechanisms which the family uses, such as a car or refrigerator, run best when all the adjustments are right, and even a good piece of equipment will run badly if some part is out of adjustment. So it is with the home itself. Your family life will run more smoothly if the daily program and the habits of each member are adjusted to the other as nearly as possible. Keep similar hours and make the hours count. Budget your time so that there will be opportunity for happy hours together. Go out to well chosen places which both enjoy, and do not forget to cultivate the pleasures of home. Learn to like the same things. When out in company let each aid the other, not compete for attention, but each helping the other to appear at his best and to have a good time.

Avoid little inconveniences which hurt because they way give the impression that one does not care. Many unnecessary tensions arise when people thwart and hamper each other. Each should be able to feel that all his interests arc more secure because of the other, and that it is easier to live a satisfactory life because of the mate.
The changes of experience bring us now to the need of fulfillment with another, and again to the desire for self-realization as individuals. In marriage there is a fine balancing of freedom and team-play. The individual is free but not too independent; unique, but not separate. One wants to avoid either the extreme of submergence of one's personality, or that of being so independent that loneliness and frustration result. We find life most fully when we share it, and we find our best selves in each other's hearts. Let each married person give generous scope for the development of the individuality of the other. To hamper the other is to impoverish also the self. Tagore has said:

"Let my love like sunlight, surround you
And yet give you illumined freedom."