1204. No, marriage is far from being an exception. On the contrary, it even proves to be shrinking very rapidly to become a mere repetition of the past. We see thus people who in their early youth – from childhood to around the end of their twenties – are extremely marriage-minded, fall madly in love and cannot understand that anything else can equal or constitute a greater desire than married life with one's beloved. They cannot understand that this feeling or connection with their beloved will not last a lifetime, indeed, beyond "death" itself. With their heart and soul, with their entire youthful force and strength they promise one another "eternal fidelity", only to be absolutely miserable about their formerly so much desired and indispensable married life after some years. This phenomenon, and several others, is sometimes due to the fact that during their married life the young couple have reached maturity (at about the end of the twenties), when their true standard of evolution, which they reached in their previous life, begins to influence the spheres of interest of their present life. Since this influence can be due only to new mental states that have not been outgrown and the strong, unsatisfied desires ensuing from these, the hunger for the satisfaction of these desires will immediately supplant the already outgrown or satiated interests occurring in the mentality, interests that can occur only as repetitions. These already outgrown phenomena cannot of course give rise to the same demands for attention as the phenomena that have not been outgrown or satisfied. And the repetitions from previous lives, which are all originally satisfied interests, must therefore all wither with the onset of the original intellectual standard in the being's consciousness. If the interest in marriage has been more or less outgrown during previous lives, and therefore in the present life is merely a repetition, it must similarly to a corresponding extent wither when the being meets its true intellectual level. And thus we find here the situation of the above-mentioned young couple. It is of course inevitable that this new sphere of interest, which thus arises in the being's consciousness at the same time as other spheres of interest (the outgrown ones) suddenly wither, brings the being into collision with promises, connections and relationships that were based on the continued life of the interests that have now withered. And this collision is in fact the universal cause of unhappy marriages. Where the interest in marriage in a being's present life is merely a repetition of a desire that is more or less outgrown or satisfied in a previous life, a desire that must wither as soon as the being reaches its true intellectual step – a step that demands unrelenting cultivation – marriage can continue only as a more or less artificial phenomenon, if indeed the new demands do not render married life totally impossible.
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