Aristotle, marriage, and the balanced life

Have always found it hard to nail the philosophers down on marriage (not a lot to say, or wise enough to keep their mouths shut!) but a friend getting married reminded me of the topic, and I really must look into it again. Especially I must revisit Aristotle, since , whether by cultural default or reasoned choice,  I have a lot of time for him, and especially like (what I understand to be) his conception of the balanced life, involving family and children.

After Plato's excessive abstraction and airiness, Aristotle I think provided a wonderfully pragmatic foundation for Western civilization, as beautifully depicted in Raphael's "School Of Athens" which shows Plato gesticulating to the sky, while Aristotle points firmly back down to earth. While we must examine and question life, there is no point in wandering about with our head in the clouds. Life is about real things, real commitments and enterprises, not abstract wondering, and marriage, family, settling down, is somehow part of that reality for the social animal that is man.

 
                                        

What I also intuit from him (but need to confirm this) is the idea that via these things there is one of the roads to happiness, whereby one gains happiness not by striving for it itself, but by seeking it for others. As he says in the Nichnomachean Ethics, the essence of love "seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved".  Given our willful and whimsical nature, how we habituate and how desire begets satisfaction, begets desire, then there is something in this. This I think is complemented by the Aristotelian idea of such things a happiness etc. as actitivites rather than states : to be happy is to act in such a way, not to achieve a state, and to experience love, is to love, not to be loved.  And that is what a family offers - the opportunity to love by choice, not through duty or default, others, one's wife/husband, and children; to work for their benefit at the (at least partial) cost of one's own. And of course, it's nice the way evolution provides the innate drive to gain satisfaction from that as well, but one that doesn't habituate.

"In being loved, on the other hand, people delight for its own sake; whence it would seem to be better than being honoured, and friendship to be desirable in itself. But it seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving; for some mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return (if they cannot have both), but seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering; and they themselves love their children even if these owing to their ignorance give them nothing of a mother's due. Now since friendship depends more on loving, and it is those who love their friends that are praised, loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends, so that it is only those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends, and only their friendship that endures."
Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII