Delphic Maxim 95: Guide your wife (or husband)
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
95. Guide your wife (or husband)
Grappling with the maxims that deal with marriage and partnership is particularly difficult for me. I think over time I have been conditioned to find that sort of talk sappy and emotional. I also tend to think of myself as a deeply independent person, so relying on a significant other is something that doesn’t come naturally. So keep that in mind as I sort of muck my way through this one.
Very early on in this series of posts I wrote about the maxim that asks us to ‘intend to get married’. I don’t necessarily see this one as a sequel, more of a way of living: guide your partner, whatever form that relationship might take.
Guide is probably the right word to use here, rather than other suggestions like ‘lead’. A guide is someone who travels alongside you, responding to your interests and desires, rather than tell you where to go. A guide offers suggestions, helps us to navigate danger and difficulty, and provides emotional and physical support as you go. And a guide also teaches us about the world.
A partnership — whether that’s marriage, an unmarried relationship, or even just a close friendship — is defined by reciprocity. We reciprocate the affections and attentions of the people we are closest to, and this makes the idea of a ‘guide’ even more compelling. While the maxim seems to put a lot of onus on each of us as individuals, the communality that comes with that (each of us should act as a guide for the other) makes this a collective enterprise.
If we’re all guiding each other, then we’re all getting supported as we aim to finish the race. Guides are a supporting infrastructure — scaffolding, if you will — to get us through life’s difficulties. Earlier this week we had a look at the idea of kindness and the importance of treating everyone kindly. We take this into a heightened domain when we are acting as a guide for the people closest to us — we are both kind, but also consciously looking out for another person in our life.
None of this contradicts the idea that a person is just fine functioning on their own, by the way. The Delphic maxims are guides (!) to life, not rules — they provide a framework to think about how we grow as people in the world. The lesson that comes through them all is that we are all part of a network of people — a community of human beings — and that our personal development comes not through solitude but through our growth with others.
That doesn’t mean we have to get married, to reiterate that point. At the time I quoted John Keats, who may have been in love on a number of occasions, but not as in love as he was with nature, the world (the thousand worlds he lived in), and with the practice of poetry and writing. Even Keats, though, knew that he was enmeshed in social relations. He was guided by and provided guidance to his close friends — and his letters to his close family is evidence of that.
The take away for today’s maxim is to be kind to the people around you, but most importantly to be one of life’s sherpas to the people closest to you — and to allow them to do the same for you. It doesn’t have to be a significant other — though if it is, all the closer — but our close friends and family are just as needing of guidance, and able to guide us. That’s the nature of our human community.
