Is Love a Choice or a Feeling?

[Michie]

Spoiler alert: It's both. And we need both, in harmony, in order to love the way God wants us to love.

“Love isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice.”

I’ve heard it countless times in various Catholic educational contexts: high school classrooms, RCIA, marriage preparation, etc.

Is it helpful? Yes, and no. Without a broader education on the reality of love, especially when it comes to the love between men and women, I find it unrelatable.

We are human. Sexual attraction, while not everything, isn’t nothing, either, when it comes to choosing a spouse. Being human means we are both body and soul. One of the earliest heresies in the Church was the gnostic heresy, which denied the goodness of the body. (So much so that homosexual relations were encouraged because of their sterility . . . if you just had to relieve yourself of sexual frustration.) But we are also our souls, endowed with reason. We can’t just abandon our spouse if or when “that lovin’ feeling” fades.

Are we doomed to live out only one aspect of our humanity when it comes to marital love? Will reason or the emotions win out in the end?

Thankfully, the late Pope Benedict XVI can help us sort out how to understand love as an action, something we can choose and determine, and love as an emotion beyond our natural control.

Benedict discusses the concept of love in his first encyclical as Pope, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). He begins with the problem of language. The Greeks had four words to describe love’s four dimensions: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (romance), and agape (sacrifice). We don’t need to examine all four in order to show that love can be both a choice and a feeling. Just eros and agape, analyzed within the context of marriage, will get the job done.

Continued below.

Is Love a Choice or a Feeling?

I've heard so many times that love is not a feeling, but a choice. But that's not true. It's both—and we need both to love authentically.

www.catholic.com

 

[fide]

This article misses the mark by such an immense measure, that the best thing I can say in response is, Please delete this thread.
With all due respect.

 

[Michie]

This article misses the mark by such an immense measure, that the best thing I can say in response is, Please delete this thread.
With all due respect.

No. With all due respect I thought it was quite good. I’m not sure why you are taking issue with it.

 

[fide]

1. Marital love includes at least three - not two - of the kinds of love describable in the Greek: Not only agape, and eros, but very importantly phileo love, the love of friendship. The friendship to be found in sacramental marriage is profound, deep and rich.
2. Agape love is not merely "sacrificial" for the sake of the good of the beloved - there is a supernatural mutual self-donation which creates a mutual indwelling analogous to the mutual gift and indwelling of the Holy Trinity. Created agape love is a human participation in our created human nature made possible by the "image and likeness" made in us by the Creator, to enable a union in the Trinity which is our vocation. This supernatural love is worthy and made possible by the unique graces of the holy sacrament of matrimony.
3. Eros is not made for "fun", or "enjoyment" - of mere self-satisfaction - characteristic of lust - but for human fulfillment, the fullfillment complimentarity designed into human nature. This natural fulfillment is supernaturalized by the essential presence of the supernatural love of "agape."
4. The truth revealed in Ephesians 5 - that the husband and wife relationship prophetically reveals the mystery of Christ and the Church - judges the shallow picture of a Catholic Marriage described in this article. The union of Christ and the Church - anticipated in every act of conjugal union - proclaims the sacred meaning of the marital act, which deserves reverence, not merely response to "that lovin' feeling."
5. Conjugal love is ordered to fruitfulness with and in God - whether in the creation of new human beings made in the divine image, or the infusion of new life, by grace, into the husband and the wife and the whole family - in analogy with that resulting in the mutual indwelling self-gift of Christ and His Bride, in their mutual love. This truth elevates the conjugal union into the heart of God, the Sacred heart of Jesus Christ.
6. The crucial and essential, necessary Truth concerning Catholic marital love is found in the word "supernatural" - because of which the limitations of natural understandings and experience are inadequate to explain it. Catholic Sacramental Love, ultimately and finally, is all about GOD - God in us, us in God and with one another .
7. The above 6 may not be complete, but these deficiencies come immediately to mind. I need to leave now....

 

[seeker2122]

I would like to chime in and simply say this, Love is the Truth.
If there is no Truth, then love cannot exist. Truth is what makes Love real.
So whether you believe love is a feeling, a choice, or both, the bottom line is they are all based
on the fact that love comes from and can only come from the Truth.
In other words, before there is a choice, before there is a feeling, love was already there/existent because of the Truth.