By Matt Walsh
It’s no surprise that we are so bad at marriage in this culture.
We’re bad at it because we don’t understand it, and we don’t understand it because we don’t understand love. You can’t forge a lasting marriage if all you know about love is what you learned from an Ed Sheeran song. It’s like trying to build a car when you think engines run on fairy dust. And that’s essentially how many of us approach marriage. We believe it’s fueled by some intense and mystical emotional force — a force we inaccurately call “love” — and as soon as we run out of this mysterious cosmic gasoline all we can do is send it to the scrap yard and find a new model.
This view is popular in our society because it removes all responsibility and blame from the individual. Marriage is presented as a passive endeavor, established and destroyed by forces outside of our control. Love is something you “fall into,” like a puddle, and then “out of,” like an unsafe carnival ride, and there’s not much you can really do to cause the one or prevent the other. “These things happen,” we say. Oops, I’m married. Oops, I’m having an affair. Oops, I’m divorced. Oops, I’m married again. Oops, I’m divorced again. Oops, I’m lonely and isolated and everyone I’ve ever known resents me. Oops!
But here’s the reality: these were our choices, every step of the way, and that state which we’ve found ourselves falling in and out of is not real love. Real love is an act of will. A decision. A conscious activity. It is something you do and live. Love is chosen, and if it is protected and nurtured, it grows. Love is sacrifice. Love is effort. Love is everything St. Paul describes in First Corinthians, and especially in Ephesians 5: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy.” Love is dying to the self. Love is many things, and none of them happen by accident.
Even people who understand this will still sometimes talk about love in a way that contributes to the confusion. A married couple may describe the moment they “fell in love,” very early on in their relationship, well before they walked down the aisle. They may even claim to have experienced “love at first sight.” This is all fine fodder for Hallmark cards and Nicholas Sparks novels — which, as we know, are based on Hallmark cards — but it doesn’t actually make sense. Far be it for me to make this determination, but, no, you didn’t love your wife the moment you laid eyes on her. You thought she was hot, sure, but that’s not the same thing.
I can say with certainty that I love my wife now. I can also say that I did not love her a week after I’d met her. I surely didn’t love her the first time I saw her. I thought she was beautiful. I liked a lot of things about her. But love her? No. How could I? I didn’t know her. I’d made no commitment to her. I wasn’t sharing my life with her. I wasn’t really sharing anything with her except for an appetizer at Chili’s. Yes, I loved her as a child of God, in the same sense that I’m obligated to love all humanity, but I didn’t love her in the way that I love her now. I couldn’t have. This love, the love we have now, is defined by commitment, sacrifice, and devotion, and none of those dimensions are present when you’re just dating someone.
It’s more accurate to say, when we first met, I was infatuated with her. There was an intense, mostly selfish, attachment. I wasn’t being intentionally selfish, it just made me feel good to be around her so I tried to be around her as much as possible. That’s what I liked most about her at this stage: how she made me feel. I didn’t “love” her for her own sake, but for my sake. I think every relationship must start this way, but it can’t survive if it stays this way.
Absurdly, people often refer to this period of infatuation as the “in love phase,” but there couldn’t be a worse way to describe it. This phase, this extraordinary emotional pull that you feel early in a relationship, is supposed to be the fuel that drives you to the altar. It isn’t love itself, but it gives you the incentive and energy to get there. It’s like the thrust that jettisons a rocket into outer space. If I knew anything about astrophysics I could extend the analogy, but hopefully you get my point. The infatuation you feel for your girlfriend has no real meaning or value on its own; it is, rather, a propulsion towards something.
The trouble is, in our culture, couples experience that propulsion but they don’t go anywhere with it. They have all of this emotional energy, all of this fuel, but they’re afraid to make the journey into the great beyond. Or they wait until it’s worn off and then, by default, after years of living together, finally tie the knot. There’s a reason why those relationships are much more likely to end in divorce. The so-called “in love phase” — which really has nothing to do with love — died away long ago, but it didn’t develop into true love because true love requires commitment, and they waited far too long to make the commitment. So they’ve lived with each other without the emotional attachment, and without love, for years before finally wandering lazily down the aisle. Not a good way to start things.
More commonly, of course, people will stay together only so long as the infatuation lasts. That’s how you end up with a generation of 20 and 30-somethings who’ve never been married but think they’ve had deep, rich “love” for, like, 19 different people. In truth, they never loved anyone. They simply experienced a fleeting enthusiasm over and over again. They’ve fallen into infatuation many times. They never once chosen love.