As Valentine's Day approaches, people everywhere are looking for love, but what love is has seemed unexplainable. I am proud to tell readers of New York Trend what I am grateful with all my heart for having learned. Eli Siegel, the great American poet and critic, who founded the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism in 1941, has described love so truly, and what opposes it so exactly, that at last we can learn how to love. 

     By the time I was twenty, a serious student of art history and singing, I was worried I would never be able to care for someone in the way I hoped. I wrote to a man whom I had told I could not marry, sentences which show my confusion, and also a desire — which I now see as very unkind — to make sure I still had power over him: 

     The best thing in every person, I learned, and our deepest desire, is to like the world. But everyone also has the ugly desire for contempt which Mr. Siegel defined as "a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not [one]self." The desire to have contempt is responsible for all the cruelty between people. Any person who loves us will want to do everything they can to strengthen our like for the world, and criticize our desire to make less of it in any way. When a woman needs a man for this purpose, and has this purpose with him, she is proud! 

      But most women are not proud of what they need men for. I felt I needed a man to praise me, assure me I was wonderful, and console me for the agitation, tedium and insults of life in a world I saw as mixed-up, cold and unkind. This is not love: it is exploitation, and it makes a person — it made me — deeply ashamed. 

     I also did not feel through "bringing out what is best in another person," I would, as Mr. Siegel said, "flourish" myself. My idea of criticism was to issue instructions to a man about how he needed to change in order to be worthy of me! I would go after having a big effect on a man, but often, when I succeeded, I would abruptly decide I didn't want to see him any more — and if he suffered, I thought he deserved it for falling below my ideal. I saw myself as a heroine, disappointed in my noble search for someone worthy of me. Any woman who sees love this way may tell herself she is unlucky in love, as I did, but the reason she feels empty, cheap, and desolate is because she has gone against her own deepest desire, to like the world and have good will. 

     I am eternally grateful to Eli Siegel for criticizing the way I saw men and showing me what I really hoped for. It was a great relief to hear him ask me in a class: "Do you see a man as an enemy to tame, or someone you have beautiful hopes about?" And he asked: "Do you believe your end purpose with a man looks good to you? Do you believe you are interested in men to glorify yourself?" I said yes; and he told me: "Ask, 'A year from now, do I want to respect this person I'm making a date with? Do I want this person's life to be better?'" 

     Mr. Siegel explained: "I say you have to have good will. If you don't have good will for the things of the world all the time you are untrue to yourself and to the world. I recommend you say to yourself formally, 'I am now going to reconsider my philosophy of life and am glad to do so.'" 

    I did! And I began to have a new life. 
 

     As I studied Aesthetic Realism, the way I saw the world and people changed tremendously. Eli Siegel presented — in thousands of instances of poetry, art, literature, science, and history — evidence that the world can be honestly liked because, as he wrote, "it is the oneness of opposites." And every day, as I went to work, walked on the street, talked with people, looked at paintings, plays, music — I saw the opposites in things. 

     In Aesthetic Realism lessons and classes, I heard Eli Siegel speak with people about their lives, and I saw that a man was not "an enemy to tame," he had hopes and feelings like my own. I saw what a man wanted most was the same thing I wanted — to be proud of how he saw the world. And men, like women, were trying to put reality's opposites together in themselves: strength and gentleness, assertion and yielding, pride and humility, anger and tenderness. I wrote sentences about what I respected in a man I knew; I wrote about an argument we had, trying to present his point of view; I asked myself, as Mr. Siegel had taught me to: "Do I want to respect this person more? Do I want this person's life to be better?" I saw that that was what I wanted! I saw I could be proud to need a man for the same reason I am proud to need a painting or a song, because he is a means of my having emotion about the world I respect myself for. 

     This is what I am so happy and grateful to feel about the man I love, composer Edward Green. Through knowing him, my feeling about other people is warmer, deeper. And we have a wonderful, thrilling time together studying the magnificent way Aesthetic Realism sees the art we both love and teach — music. Ed thinks about what I am asking of myself, and where I need to ask more, and criticizes me with kind, clear logic, and surprising humor. I am proud to need his encouragement to be the best person I can be, and I passionately want to be a means of his life being as fortunate and strong as possible. This is an emotion I would have been incapable of had I not met Aesthetic Realism, and I am very grateful to have it. 

     It is the honor of my life, as an Aesthetic Realism consultant, to teach with my colleagues at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, what I have learned — in individual consultations, both in person, and by telephone to people across America — and to see the beautiful changes this new, kind education makes in people's lives. And I am very fortunate to be continuing my study in the great classes taught by the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss — to be learning from her wide scholarship, honesty, and good will. 

     In Aesthetic Realism, is the greatest love for people and the world that has ever been, and I want every person to meet it! It is in this poem by Eli Siegel, definitive, musical, true! 
 

Carrie Wilson is a consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and teaches the course "The Art of Singing: Technique and Feeling." The Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation, is located at 141 Greene St., NY, NY 10012, (212) 777-4490, http://www.AestheticRealism.org.