Troubling Question

[Thomas C.]

Hey folks, I was talking online to my friend (just friends) about the topic of marriage and we got into an argument about the nature of love (the kind found in marriage). I told her that I wanted to eventually marry a virtuous Orthodox girl and have a marriage blessed by the Church. My belief is that if she loves God she would make a good wife and mother. I also admitted that there would have to be a romantic attraction between us. So basically a love that can be developed through love of God, children, and family well being.

Then things get really emotional and dramatic out of nowhere; she accused me of not believing in love. That this kind of love was for social welfare, and not really for love. I think what really set things off was when I said I didn't believe in soulmates. I used to, but I believe now that a man can love any woman; just that some are more difficult to love than others. My reasoning for this is from the high divorce rate, and the selfish way dating and sex are defined in our American culture.

She took offense to this, saying that true love only happens once in a lifetime, that any other love is merely regular attachment and getting used to each other. She described love as a feeling that will make your heart beat fast. I disagreed, saying that love is an action. It escalated from there and she ended up leaving the conversation before I could try to explain myself to her. Sadly many things were lost in translation online that would have been understood face-to-face.

But this got me to thinking, is love an action? or is it a feeling? I don't think love could be emotional in the sense of feeling, but possibly intuitive? A point she brought up was that people can't understand "true love" unless they have experienced it. It reminded me of Fr. Maximos in The Mountain of Silence saying that many who claim to be theologians only have ideas about God...while real Theologians have knowledge of God brought on by experience, or something like that. So is it vain to talk about the love of marriage when you haven't experienced it yet?

This made me question and examine my own beliefs about what I thought love was. I hope, after this heated argument, that my friend will forgive me if I offended her.

 

[rusmeister]

Try this out:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/whats_wrong.html
Chapter 7, "The Free Family"

The world has taught us that love is a feeling. The Church helps gradually cure us of this.
Jesus didn't command us to have warm fuzzy feelings for our neighbor, which is practically impossible, anyway. Imagine trying to generate feelings where none exist. Isn't that a falsification of who we are? But the confusion of Eros - the attraction that brings us together - with agape - the determination (love) that keeps us together when our feelings are pulling us apart has lead most to embrace the definition of love as feeling, because that makes our self 'happy'. How else are families that stay together for 20 years or more to raise children and a spouse to provide us with any comfort at all in our old age possible?

Don't be "hooked on a feeling."

• "Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905

You're on the right track. It's your friend that hasn't begun to understand this yet.

Oh, and me? Married 15 yrs.

 

[Akathist]

http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Fami...ef=sr_1_5/002-9469069-5767266?ie=UTF8&s=books

That is a great book.

More about your question in the OP.

I believe that often people assume infatuation is "love". And that it is an emotion like infatuation is an emotion. But I believe love is a gift from God to us. But this gift involves a choice. We choose to accept the gift or not.

I also don't believe in soul mates. I think that there are people we are more compatible with then others and there is a chemistry that draws people together. But what keeps them together is the choice to love in the face of difficulties.

Marriage is rough. It sands away at us and shines us up if we work with the process. But it can also be distructive too. That is why the Church really encourages people to marry within the faith.

I think you thoughts about love are right on target.

 

[Vedant]

Try this out:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/whats_wrong.html
Chapter 7, "The Free Family"

The world has taught us that love is a feeling. The Church helps gradually cure us of this.

That's awesome. Love is so much more than that. Just ask any couple that's been together for like 50 years.

 

[Khaleas]

I once read a blog by a person who is Orthodox. He wrote: Love is a choice, not a feeling.
Sure it can start out with attraction and all that makes you feel funny when you're with the person and feel funny when you're not.
But you still have the option of choosing weather to date this person or not. Does she/he "fit the bill" so to say or was it just her blonde hair/his fat wallet that seemed interesting.

Imagine how much easier our teenagers would have it if they saw it as a choice not this feeling they had to experience.

The neat thing when I met my husband is one) I knew he was the one that I wanted to raise my kids with (just our puppies for now) but more importantly was the need I found for finding a church we could both raise our kids in (hubs was 'Catholic on paper'). So from being sorta kinda inquiring, I started reading more and more and soon I was a Cathecumen and was Chrismated. Then just under a year later my husband was Chrismated. I truly believe God was showing me that he wants us to be a 'Little Church'.

 

[kamikat]

So, how do you explain those great couples that truly glow with their love for each other?

 

[MichaelNZ]

Need proof that love isn't just a feeling? Look at the Crucifix. Did Jesus die because he had"warm fuzzy feelings" for us?

No, He loved us, was concerned for us and cared about us so much that He sacrificed Himself on the Cross in our place. That's not just "warm fuzzy feelings". That is true love. "Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13)

 

[Dust and Ashes]

I don't believe in "soulmates" either, though I believe there are people who are so compatible that it seems as if they are made for each other. I believe that love is something you do, not something that happens to you.

I wasn't head over heels in love with my wife when we got married. I saw that she was a wonderful person and that we were compatible and I committed myself to loving her and spending the rest of my life with her. My love for her grows every day and I can't imagine life without her. She completes me as a person.

I think, as others have said, that your friend is confusing infatuation with love and often infatuation can be the beginnings of love and can remain throughout a relationship. But infatuation isn't what gets you through the tough times.

Forgive me.

 

[KATHXOYMENOC]

Gary Chapman in his book THE FIVE LOVE LANGUAGES (available at most Christian bookstores) has a wonderful chapter - worth the price of the book - in which he differentiates between true love and what most people consider to be "love," which he shows is really nothing more than the mating instinct. If people read and understood what he was saying, they would see that they have been sold a bill of goods by TV, Hollywood, fairy tales, romance novels, etc.

 

[eoe]

Am I the only one that thinks this girl has a thing for him? "Just friends" don't react that way......


That is just me tho....


(she totally digs you...)

 

[Khaleas]

Am I the only one that thinks this girl has a thing for him? "Just friends" don't react that way......


That is just me tho....


(she totally digs you...)

That was my first thought too... but maybe it just was my western mind thinking...

 

[KATHXOYMENOC]

But this got me to thinking, is love an action? or is it a feeling?

"Do You Love Me"
(from Fiddler On The Roof)

Tevye: Golde, I have decided to give Perchik permission to become engaged to our daughter, Hodel.

Golde: What??? He's poor! He has nothing, absolutely nothing!

Tevye: He's a good man, Golde. I like him. And what's more important, Hodel likes him. Hodel loves him. So what can we do? It's a new world... A new world. Love.

Golde... Do you love me?

Golde: Do I what?

Tevye: Do you love me?

Golde: Do I love him?
With our daughters getting married
And this trouble in the town,
You're upset, you're worn out,
Go inside, go lie down maybe it's indigestion.

Tevye: Golde I'm asking you a question!
Do you love me?

Golde: You're a fool!

Tevye: I know but do you love me?

Golde: Do I love you?
For twenty five years I've washed your clothes,
Cooked your meals,
Cleaned your house,
Given you children,
Milked your cows,
After twenty five years
Why talk about love right now?

Tevye: Golde, the first time I met you was on our wedding day,
I was scared

Golde: I was shy

Tevye: I was nervous

Golde: So was I

Tevye: But my father and my mother said,
We'd learn to love each other,
So now I'm asking Golde,
Do you love me?

Golde: I'm your wife!

Tevye: But do you love me?

Golde: Do I love him?
For twenty five years I've lived with him,
Fought with him,
Starved with him,
Twenty five years--
My bed is his,
If that's not love, what is?

Tevye: Then you love me?

Golde: I suppose I do

Tevye: And I suppose I love you too

Both: It doesn't change a thing, but even so,
After twenty five years,
It's nice to know.

 

[ufonium2]

Love is definitely a choice. My grandparents hardly knew each other when they were married; they had met for the first time two weeks before. But they've been married over fifty years, and are the cutest couple I know.

I think the idea of a soul mate, of ridiculously warm and fuzzy love, does a lot more to damage our society--especially our teenagers--than we realize.

 

[Prawnik]

I read somewhere that people today put more effort into finding an apartment to rent than our grandparents did in finding a spouse. You take a look around, everything seems to check out, you write a deposit check and sign on the dotted line.

I don't know how true that is, but it reminds me of the Hindu-style arranged marriage and its semi-arranged cousin, and why it appears to work in Indian society. For one thing, divorce and illegitimacy are practically unheard of there.

Part of the secret of Indian success is lower expectations - noone goes into an arranged marriage expecting a romance on the scale of Romeo and Juliet, and getting a divorce because you feel unfulfilled is unthinkable in India. And as Vedant can point out much better than I, a marriage involves families, and the breakup of a marriage brings shame upon both families. Regardless of any internal tension, it is important to present a ideal picture in public.

Also in India, male and female rights and obligations are pretty much set for you by society. You're a Jat Sikh woman, you pretty much know what you can expect from a husband and what he will expect of you. For better or for worse, in the West every couple has to make it up as they go along.

Like a good pluralist, I am trying to avoid value judgments.

Then again, I recoil in horror at the kind of the wife of my mother would pick out for me if allowed to do so.

 

[KATHXOYMENOC]

On the other hand, I suspect that in many of these arranged marriage societies, it is understood that men may often get their sexual needs met with women not their wives. Yes? No?

 

[Prawnik]

I suspect that it frequently happens. Somewhat like our own society.

 

[NyssaTheHobbit]

Ah, yes, I remember that scene from "Fiddler on the Roof" because the pastor showed it to us in church one day. It had some application to the message.....

Hey folks, I was talking online to my friend (just friends) about the topic of marriage and we got into an argument about the nature of love (the kind found in marriage). I told her that I wanted to eventually marry a virtuous Orthodox girl and have a marriage blessed by the Church. My belief is that if she loves God she would make a good wife and mother. I also admitted that there would have to be a romantic attraction between us. So basically a love that can be developed through love of God, children, and family well being.

Then things get really emotional and dramatic out of nowhere; she accused me of not believing in love. That this kind of love was for social welfare, and not really for love. I think what really set things off was when I said I didn't believe in soulmates. I used to, but I believe now that a man can love any woman; just that some are more difficult to love than others. My reasoning for this is from the high divorce rate, and the selfish way dating and sex are defined in our American culture.

She took offense to this, saying that true love only happens once in a lifetime, that any other love is merely regular attachment and getting used to each other. She described love as a feeling that will make your heart beat fast. I disagreed, saying that love is an action. It escalated from there and she ended up leaving the conversation before I could try to explain myself to her. Sadly many things were lost in translation online that would have been understood face-to-face.

But this got me to thinking, is love an action? or is it a feeling? I don't think love could be emotional in the sense of feeling, but possibly intuitive? A point she brought up was that people can't understand "true love" unless they have experienced it. It reminded me of Fr. Maximos in The Mountain of Silence saying that many who claim to be theologians only have ideas about God...while real Theologians have knowledge of God brought on by experience, or something like that. So is it vain to talk about the love of marriage when you haven't experienced it yet?

This made me question and examine my own beliefs about what I thought love was. I hope, after this heated argument, that my friend will forgive me if I offended her.

It sounds to me like you've got the right idea, while she (like I once was) has been deluded by the ideas which have led to rampant divorce. I think my youth would have been much easier if I hadn't believed all this stuff about God having chosen one person you're "meant" to be with. Breakups would've been easier because, instead of thinking-- "But he's the One! He'll come back eventually; I just have to wait long enough and convince him we're meant to be"-- I would've thought, "I guess I'll have to look elsewhere."

BTW--I've been married going on 10 years, with no end in sight. It's not a perfect marriage; it's not Romeo and Juliet (they died anyway), and it's not endless bliss with no arguments. But we work on it and realize we're in it for good. St. John Chrysostom wrote that love is not enough to keep people together; the wife needs the husband to provide and the husband needs the wife to keep the place clean (keeping in mind that this was written in the 4th century).

 

[Paisley]

I think Mark Twain said it best:

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
- Notebook, 1894

 

[gzt]

Prawnik: heh, though I'll bet my mother would've picked out much better girls than I did when I was in [viz] high school. Though I'm much wiser these days.

 

[Orthocat]

Groucho (to Chico): Do you love your brother?
Chico (looks at Harpo): Nah, but I'm used to him.