By The Master Justin Moreward Haig

Question: My wife has taken on a lover. What should I do?

Answer: There is a great distinction between a man allowing his wife to have a lover and condoning it when she has got one, because he knows that her passion is stronger than herself. Why do you condemn her for her weakness in not being able to renounce this man, yet omit to condemn your own weakness in not being able to forgive? Your wife still loves you as I predicted and her affection must be really deep and true if she can fall in love with another and still love you. As I said the other night, if you remember perhaps, you have been led by a process of hypnosis, so the speak, to believe that one love kills another. That is untrue; that criterion of real love is that it lasts beyond the birth of a new passion.

Has it ever struck you that true love always thinks of the happiness of the beloved? And if that happiness comes even through another man's arms, love doesn't mind.

What, after all, is marriage and what does it become? The ordinary man starts matrimony with a mixture of romantic sentiment and physical passion; the sentiment by degrees dies away, the passion dies away also (dwindling into an occasion of gratification of the senses), and in the place of these two things comes either friendship or utter indifference. If the latter, then, for a man to be upset when his wife also falls in love with somebody else seems unreasonable; if the former, then, for him to be upset seems equally unreasonable, true friendship being greatly enhanced when it can act as the receiver of confidence. You yourself admitted you were never so fond of your friend as when you were able to confide in him your own romantic passion. And what does that mean? Why, that if you had sympathized with your wife over this new love of her's, and let her fearlessly confide in you, she would never have felt so fond of you as during that exchange of confidence and sympathy.

And it would be so because she, all the time, would sense the nobility of your unexpressed forgiveness, and therefore not only be grateful, but full of admiration as well. Indeed, nothing augments affection so much as gratitude and admiration combined and, therefore, I cannot think I was wrong when the other night I told you had let slip the great opportunity of your married life. For where there is true affection, no opportunity is so golden as the one which affords us something to forgive, since to forgive is at the same time to manifest nobility of character, and thus to show ourselves noble before the object of our love. Yet, as one form of forgiveness may need to express itself in words, the greatest of any is that which is so self-evident it requires no words to express it at all, its presence being rendered all the more conspicuous by its very absence.