Saturday, October 16, 2004
What is love?
Hint -- It's not a feeling.
When I prepare my marriage couples, I tell them that the love they feel for each other is going to change over time, and will most probably go through periods in which it diminishes considerably. Realize that this will happen so that, when it does, you won't be alarmed. The married couple's love is not all about feelings, although we hope the feelings are there. The spouses will almost certainly meet other people for whom they have very strong feelings, perhaps even stronger than for their own partners. That is a passion and neither has moral value on its own, nor does it serve as a guide to right moral action.
For the married couple, their love is something willed, decided on, and vowed, and so it surpasses the ups and downs of the passions. This is what makes fidelity and permanence possible in marriage. I've had people ask me whether they weren't being false if they continued an otherwise good marriage when they no longer felt the strong love that they felt before (and this often goes hand-in-hand with having found someone else for whom they do feel that spark of love again).
This seems to me to be one of the biggest problems we have, here in the good old US of A. We don't know how to love. That's my problem anyway. Suggestions?
When I prepare my marriage couples, I tell them that the love they feel for each other is going to change over time, and will most probably go through periods in which it diminishes considerably. Realize that this will happen so that, when it does, you won't be alarmed. The married couple's love is not all about feelings, although we hope the feelings are there. The spouses will almost certainly meet other people for whom they have very strong feelings, perhaps even stronger than for their own partners. That is a passion and neither has moral value on its own, nor does it serve as a guide to right moral action.
For the married couple, their love is something willed, decided on, and vowed, and so it surpasses the ups and downs of the passions. This is what makes fidelity and permanence possible in marriage. I've had people ask me whether they weren't being false if they continued an otherwise good marriage when they no longer felt the strong love that they felt before (and this often goes hand-in-hand with having found someone else for whom they do feel that spark of love again).
This seems to me to be one of the biggest problems we have, here in the good old US of A. We don't know how to love. That's my problem anyway. Suggestions?
