Love of Someone else is an experience involving a rejoicing in and celebrating the individuality of the other. A marriage is happy when two people want and try to achieve what is best for each other. Their love is not conditional. It is not that they love each other because the other loves them. This is not the love of freedom. It is rather that each loves their partner freely and their joy is complete in the discovery that their partner freely loves them.
On the other hand, love is creative. It takes a lot of living to be able to love. It requires self-knowledge, self-discipline, a sense of humour, humility, imagination, and so on to love. Love is the highest achievement of the human person. Why? To want what is best for the other is difficult. To know what is best for oneself is a mature achievement. To know what is best for one's engaged or married partner is an even greater challenge.
What then is necessary if two people are to keep discovering through courtship and marriage what is best for each other?
Commitment, care, openness, responsibility, understanding, humour, fidelity, and above all, communication. These are qualities and achievements which flow from a creative approach to marriage. These qualities don't just happen between people as do the passive experiences of infatuation, emotional involvement and desire. It is the creative aspects of marriage, mentioned before, that help people to live with their spontaneous attractions towards many other people, their physical feelings for other people and to enter into a healthy personal involvements with other people without fear of infidelity. The qualities which must be developed in order to become a lover involve strengths which prevent a marriage relationship from being contaminated by jealousy, possessiveness and exclusiveness.
Lovers must be creative right through their married relationship. Because people are changing all the time, love requires a continual discovery between two people, a sustained creativity. There are no formulas for experiencing love. There are no biological formulas, no physical techniques, which guarantee love. There are no sensitivity programmes which can make people love each other. People can't be conditioned to love each other. No blueprint of social organisation can guarantee love. Love is an attitude which only people themselves can develop from their own inner resources. Love is an art which other people can inspire us to practise. But like every art, there are no short cuts. Each person has to master his art in their own way, true to their own personality.
Love faces reality and transforms it. Romance, that mixture of sentiment, feeling, attraction, and passion, isolates itself from the harder realities of life and sets up its own make-believe. Love does not deny the romantic experiences of human relationships. But love transforms these romantic experiences into more enduring and fulfilling realities.
Love goes far beyond the physical person of the beloved. Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. The salvation of man is through love and in love. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Love is only possible between real, not idealised, people. There are no formulas such as, you have to accept people for what they are, no short-cuts such as, getting carried away by another person, no techniques such as how to arouse each other, for discovering the reality of the other. This must be approached in freedom, and encountered not as a stereotype. Love seeks out the mystery of the other through his or her real self and therefore through his or her limitations. love does not measure the worth of the other in terms of conformity to some socially conditioned and stereotyped ideal.
Marriage is only for real lovers. The real point is not where two people are at,
now, at this point in time. The important point is whether lovers are open to the possibility that the intensity of these romantic, emotional, passionate experiences, is no guarantee that they love each other. If they can live with this reality, and accept the fact that although what they have is fulfilling, it will not remain forever that way unless there is growth in the relationship, then they are open to the experience of love.
In every good love affair there are always unique expressions of love which will sound silly to everyone else. Love is the most personal experience in the world. So are many of it's expressions.What characterises a love affair which is reaching into the total human reality of both partners, is that there is a broad variety of expressions of love. There is no fixation on physical expressions, no dependency on physical expressions.
LOVE IS AN ART. Not an overwhelming, irresistible impulse.
Truth is an expression of love. The best expression of love may be to share the truth. It is good for both to know the nature and extent of their desire with each other. Truth and humour combine in a marvellous expression of love. They can ease tensions and deepen a relationship. Humour and truth, as expressions of love, must not do violence to patience.
Morality in courtship, as in all life, is creative loving in a manner which is consistent with the nature of the relationship. Courtship is a time of assessing the integrity of making a lifetime commitment.
Courtship can be one of the most exciting periods of life. Certainly it is a time of frustration, but the main frustration should be due to the fact that you can never find enough time to be together; that every meeting is marred by the certain knowledge that you only have so long together.
To give oneself trustingly, sharing oneself in complete openness, there must be a knowledge that the other is also giving himself or herself to you in total trust and openness. Marriage vows mean that two people recognise each other's desire to totally commit themselves to each other. The need for security is fulfilled when two people accept responsibility for each other and their relationship. If there is not total commitment in a relationship, then there cannot be total trust and openness and there cannot be responsibility. Any temporary relationship, no matter how ecstatic and passionate, leaves one or both partners vulnerable and frustrated.
