My Book Review > "When Lovers are Friends", by Merle Shain

Merle Shain’s ‘When Lovers are Friends’: a very beautiful book I found in my Mom’s bookshelf. I learned a lot from this book! I love it!!! Here are a few excerpts: On men: “I wish that men understood better the value of friendship as women are coming to know it now, because too often they still see other people as things to be conquered. Men have allies and they have enemies, but only a few of them really have friends, and marriages would be much stronger if that were not the case”. “Men are just starting now to understand that women can be many more things to them than partners in the bed”. “I overheard a young man once saying to his wife, ‘I can’t control you. That’s the problem, and it’s been the problem since ever since day one!’ And I heard her answer him and heard her terrible voice. ‘No’ she said. ‘The problem isn’t that you can’t control me, the problem is you’re trying to”. On friendship: “There is much to be said for friendship. Often friendship offers things that love affairs and marriage don’t provide, like honesty and fewer demands…”. “We are all guilty from time to time of giving in a way which pleases us at the expense of someone else. [-] Giving is only giving if the other person goes away enriched”. On society: “We are in a society of winners where almost everybody feels himself a loser, where cut of clothes and size of genitals as well as make of car tell us who we are.We are a youth cult where everyone is made to feel old, a love cult where far too many feel unloved”. “All of us feel that there must be more, but wonder what the more really is”. About fear and strength: “There is a Buddhist fable written over 2000 years ago by the Buddha himself, some say, about a beautiful young elephant who lived in the forest near Benares. [-] The king entrusted her to his elephant trainers to be taught to stand firm and to follow commands, but the trainers were harsh with her [-] and one day, maddened by pain, she broke free of them and escaped. She ran as fast as she could [-] until she outdistanced all the king’s men. [-] But still she raced on, and although time passed, she did not reduce her pace or forget for a moment that she had been a captive once. [-] Finally a compassionate tree sprite could stand her pain no longer and leaned out of a fork in a tree one day and whispered into the elephant’s ear. ‘Do you fear the wind? It only moves the clouds and dries the dew. You ought to look into your mind. It’s only fear that has captured you’. And the minute the wood sprite had spoken the beautiful elephant realized that she ha nothing to fear but the habit of being afraid, and she began to enjoy life again”. “Trust in life does not mean trusting that life will always be good or that it will be free of grief and pain. It means that somewhere inside yourself you can find the strength to go forth”.