True love waits

     I think the most important question to ask those considering marriage is this—Why do they love you?  Granados and Anderson in Called to Love quotes John Paul in Love and Responsibility (90) saying, “lovers who ‘as soon as sympathy breaks down…feel that love has also come to an end’ were never mature enough for love in the first place” (52-53).

      I talk to those considering marriage in the following way:  "Why they love you is ever so important. Hopefully you can see the obvious logic of not wanting to be desired primarily for your looks. Also, you don’t want to be loved just because you are a “funny guy” or whatever. But you want them to love what is the important part of you, that which you find your true identity in as a child of God. If they are not very interested in “what makes you tick” then you have the wrong person. Likewise, what is it about them that you adore? Hopefully it’s more than ‘they are intelligent’ but that you love who they are ‘warts and all’ because she is your best friend." (To be clear, I'm basing all of this on the belief that sexual activity only belongs in marriage.)

    John Paul elaborates on these different ways of loving. Called to Love describes John Paul’s ascent of love, or growth through the types of loves, as sexuality, sentimentality, and affirmation (chapter 2, all quotes below from pages 50-60 and underlining mine). It may be helpful to look at this ascent, actually, in reverse order.

     The mature stage of love, which John Paul calls “betrothed love,” has ripened into “an affirmation of the worth that she possesses as a person independently of how he happens to feel about her.”  “So in every situation in which we experience the sexual value of a person, love demands integration, meaning the incorporation of that value in the value of the person, or indeed its subordination to the value of the person” (LR, 123).

     In sentimentality “lovers tend to idealize their beloved” and is symptomatic of a “dangerous blindness. Instead of loving the actual flesh-and-blood person before them, they love an idealized object whose value they gauge exclusively by their own subjective reactions to it.” This leads to the experience Elizabeth Baucum was describing to us of trying to change the other into your idealized picture of them and complaining in your heart about them. This reminds me of the conflicts in the church that James describes (James 4: 1-2, NRSV):

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.

This passage is not dealing with sexual love, obviously, but it does show how cravings and coveting something—or someone other than the “flesh-and-blood person before them”—leads to conflicts and disputes. As a result, “so long as we remain within the confines of mere sentiment, we can’t say yes without reserve because we are still at the mercy of the fluctuation of feeling whose very nature is to come and go. Only when love has discovered and affirmed the person for what he or she is can the lover say yes forever.” “To remain within the realm of feeling is to be stuck in yourself, to be a prisoner of your perceptions of, and reactions to, the world” and the “egoism of the feelings.” Couples, therefore, will never be able to experience the full level of “yes” body and soul until they've reached the mutuality of “betrothed love” which comes with a promise of forever.

     “The most basic level of erotic love for a person of the opposite sex is a rudimentary attraction that Karol Wojtyla calls ‘sensuality,’ a response to another’s male or female body insofar as it is a “potential object of enjoyment.” That is, sensuality is a feeling that you are a bit like a human magnet and pulled weakly or strongly towards the opposite sexual magnets. Humans are not sticks—our loves will include this element of sexuality. But also, we are not machines, and our true loves will engage our souls. “Anyone who pursues sexual pleasure as an end in itself will eventually lose even the pleasure he seeks, for sensuality can give real fulfillment only when it is integrated into the broader dimension it points to but cannot attain by itself.”

     God calls lovers to the mature love of affirmation of God’s gift of the other that they will “in so doing, embark upon the adventure of a concrete relationship with the Giver himself” (p. 74).

(And to anyone who made it to the bottom of this rather long post—perhaps Adam and Eve’s discovery of each other’s love looked like this fun video! Click here.)