Love Is A Tender Trap

A presentation I went to with some students tonight sparks the following thoughts.  Young people often ask, "When is the best time to get married?"  Or they say, "I will do this, that and the other thing, and then I will get married."  Yet, as I tell my students, the best time to fall in love is while you're still alive.  Love is a thing that cannot be planned nor something to be turned into a philosophy.  Love is best when it is done, not when it is pondered (although ponder we must). 

We must remember that love is not an emotion to be felt, but a thing to be done.  The word often used for "love" in scripture is the Greek word agape, but that word can be (and sometimes is) translated as charity, which captures the essential gift-giving  element of love.  One does not choose a marriage partner based on how that person makes you feel, although hopefully they make you feel good most of the time.  No, a marriage partner is chosen because that is the person to whom you wish to make a total gift of yourself, just as Christ made a gift of himself to us.  That is one reason why the relationship between Christ and the Church is so often described using the marriage metaphor (e.g., the Church as "bride of Christ"). 

Let me quote the eminently sober Denis De Rougmont:

To choose a woman for a wife is not to say to Miss So and So, "You are the ideal of my dreams, you more than gratify all my desires, you are the Iseult altogether lovely and desirable, of who I want to be the Tristan."  For this would be deceit and nothing enduring can be founded on deceit.  Nobody in the world can gratify me; no sooner would I be gratified than I would change!  To choose a woman for a wife is to say to Miss So and So, "I want to live with you as you are."  For this really means; "It is you I choose to share my life with me, and this is the only evidence there can be that I love you."  If anybody says, "Is that all," and this is no doubt what many young people will say, having been led by virtue of the [romantic] myth to expect goodness knows what divine transports, he must have had little experience in solitariness and dread, and little experience indeed of solitary dread.