Valentine's Day: 10 literary lessons in love

From 'Much Ado About Loving' by Jack Murnighan and Maura Kelly, 10 lessons in love from literary classics.

9. Bleak House

Charles Dickens classic Bleak House features the Bagnets, a married couple who have been together for decades. In the Bagnets, say Murnighan and Kelly, Dickens paints a portrait of a couple who obviously know how to make a relationship work. In the novel, the authors say, Dickens offers hints as to what helps to keep a marriage sweet: offering frequent compliments, learning to trust your spouse's opinion, and working to make things as pleasant as possible for the other person. In "Bleak House," that's as simple as Mr. Bagnet trying to make a fuss for his wife's birthday, and Mrs. Bagnet, in return – despite knowing that her husband is going to buy subpar meat and then cook it poorly – sitting quietly and refraining from interfering.

9 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.