Love: a goal in life
Love and Marriage
Love: a goal in life
Marriage and family have to do with love: "It is good that you exist and I love you the way you are. Your love gives me joy and hope. Because you live, I also like to live." The person who loves is concerned about the loved person, not about attributes, traits or properties of the loved person. In spite of faults and weaknesses, the loved person does not need to prove him/herself anew everyday; he can plan his life and hope that, together with his partner, it will succeed. G. Marcel says: "Love is saying: you shall not perish!" The love of one person is source of life for the other partner.
For many, it is of primary importance to be loved and they do not consider their own need and ability to love . They are always demanding instead of giving love and, therefore, are not loved in the long run. They do not find what they seek in love: overcoming human separation, self-realization. But the person who loves and is loved himself or herself, will find the purpose of life and have hope and a future.
Love and fidelity
"To love a person means agreeing to grow old together" (A. Camus). If I want to develop real confidence in someone, I have to know that I can trust him/her and be sure of his or her faithfulness. Promising fidelity and trusting in the partner is certainly one of the most important conditions for a loving relationship, for marriage. Love and fidelity is one of the basic human longings, and divorce is fundamentally opposed to it.
Today, marriage and family undergo a more difficult development than in the past. Within a few years, two persons can grow in very different ways, even opposed to each other, in our multifaceted and complicated society. If being married is more difficult today, this is because it is more difficult to stay faithful to oneself and the other partner. We must, therefore, realize that in some cases, separation is realistically unavoidable. Is fidelity really an unrealistic presumption given a future that is so full of risks, so unpredictable?
Normally, if two people promise to be faithful to each other, they intend to keep this promise. They dare risk living together with the confidence that their love will continue. Their promise to be faithful shows the durability of this decision, reaching even into a very uncertain future. By this decision people give direction and purpose to their life. They use their personal freedom to bond themselves to the partner, which includes faithfulness and responsibility.
"As long as you live, you are responsible for what you made confide in you" (St-Exupry). This responsibility for a partner means being faithful to him or her until death.
