1) The principal cause of family unhappiness--is because people are brought up to think that marriage gives happiness. Sex attraction induces to marriage and it takes the form of a promise, a hope, for happiness, which is supported by public opinion and literature; but marriage is not happiness, but always suffering, which man pays for the satisfaction of his sex desire. Suffering in the form of lack of freedom, slavery, over-satiety, disgust of all kinds of spiritual and physical defects of the mate which one has to bear; maliciousness, stupidity, falsity, vanity, drunkenness, laziness, miserliness, greed and corruption--all defects which are especially difficult to bear when not in oneself but in another person, and from which one suffers as if they were one’s own; and the same with physical defects: ugliness, uncleanliness, stench, sores, insanity, etc., which are even more difficult to bear when not in oneself. All this, or at least something of this, will always be and to bear them will be difficult for every one. But that which ought to compensate: the care, satisfaction, aid, all these things are taken as a matter of course; while all defects as if they were not a matter of course, and the more one expected happiness from marriage the more one suffers. The principal cause of this suffering, is that one expects that which does not happen, and does not expect that which always happens. And therefore escape from this suffering is only by not expecting joys, but by expecting the bad, being prepared to bear them. If you expect all that which is described in the beginning of “The Thousand and One Nights,” if you expect drunkenness, stench, disgusting diseases--then obstinacy, untruthfulness, even drunkenness, can, if not exactly be forgiven, at least be a matter of no suffering and one can rejoice that there is absent that which might have been, that which is described in “The Thousand and One Nights”: that there is no insanity, cancer, etc. And then everything that is good will be appreciated.