What Everybody Ought to Know About True Love

Isn’t love supposed to be easy? One of the hits of my own generation said so. It’s a golden song for singing in the shower. The singer croons that he “don’t know much” about history, biology, “a science book,” or “the French I took” —

But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be

There you have it. The liberal arts and natural sciences are hard, but love is easy, and it makes everything all right.

That’s not all wrong. Falling in love is easy. But practicing it is hard. Understanding it is harder yet, because we mean more than one thing by “love.”

Another difficulty of the subject is scandal. I am going to connect love with marriage, but today the suggestion that the two things are linked is considered quite a bit over the top. A generation ago, that notion had already come to be viewed as quaint. Just a few years later, it was viewed as rigid. Now it is coming to be seen as a little bit indecent. We are supposed to believe that although love and marriage may happen to coincide, they have no essential affinity with each other. Love happens without marriage, marriage without love, love with various sorts of makeshift arrangements that may or may not imitate marriage; love with marriage may be one of the possibilities, we concede, but surely it is the most awkward, confining, and implausible—isn’t it? If someone suggests that the facts may be otherwise, he is met with offended disbelief. What’s his problem? Is he just narrow-minded, or something worse?

But I do suggest that the facts are otherwise. “It is in the nature of love to bind itself”; vows are love’s native language. Love that is mute in the language of promises, though it may be called love, is not love but something else. Even the medieval courtly lovers, who glamorized the love of women not their wives, paid backhanded homage to the fact, for they delighted in extravagant vows. Those few of them who really understood what they were doing made a vow almost as extravagant as the marriage vow itself: to love their lovers chastely. Compared with these great fools, we moderns are pikers. Our foolishness is of the more clownish variety that says, “I have a committed relationship,” even though the whole point of the relationship is avoiding commitment.

[…]

Marriage rests on a different and more radical supposition: that promises can be kept. In fact, it rests on a supposition more startling still, for traditionally, not only do the lovers make various promises that spring from love, they promise love itself. From the instant of pledging till the parting by death, they vow to love and cherish. Even more pointedly, they promise this love not only if things work out, but even if they don’t: “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.”

It is certainly realistic to admit that things might not work out, but how can it be realistic to promise love anyway? If sexual love is what we commonly take it to be, then how can it be promised even if things do work out? One cannot promise to have feelings; one cannot even promise to have sexual feelings. “I, Denny, promise you, Sheila, always to feel a certain minimum level of amorous stimulation in your presence.” Impossible.

But let us replace this with a different question. If sexual love is something that can be promised, then what can it be?

Getting the answer right depends on distinguishing between different aspects of sexual love. There is an aspect that can be promised, and there is another that cannot. But we must start even further back than that with another kind of love, the kind called charity.

Charity is an attitude that exults in the sheer existence of the other person. In the words of Josef Pieper, it wants to say, “It is good that you exist; it is good that you are in this world!” Pieper remarks that it is not primarily a condition of the feelings but an attitude of the will: “I want you to exist!”

Since charity lies in the will, it might also be put: “I am prepared to do something about it!” Is it accompanied by feelings? No doubt it is, though not always the same ones. But is it a pleasant feeling? No. So far is charity from being a pleasant feeling that I may have charity for you even if I have unpleasant feelings about you. I may think it is good that you exist, I may want you to exist, and I may be prepared to do something about it, even though you have become a source of manifold sorrow to me. I would rather be unhappy about you, than happy without you in the world.

Consider the implications. If I delight in your existence, then I must want something more for you than just you existence, must I not? The attitude we are speaking of does not say, “It is good that you exist, so that you may suffer!” If I delight in the good that you are, then I must want you to experience all the good that you can: “I want you to exist well and beautifully!” So charity entails a permanent commitment of the will to the true good of the other person. I want you to be and to live, I want good things for you, I want to do good things to you, I even want to do good things because of you. Good itself seems better because of you.

Moreover, because charity is not a feeling but an activity of the will, it is something that one decides to do, and it can be promised. I can vow never to despair that you exist, but always to go on wanting you to exist. I can promise that from this day forward, I shall continue to will your true good. I can vow to learn the practices and disciplines that such a will entails. I can vow to have this will even if our friendship is strained—if at this minute I find it difficult to enjoy your company or see eye to eye with you. To be sure, such love costs me something, makes me spend myself, even makes me want to spend myself. But there is something strange about such spending. In its perfection, the person whom I love becomes another self to me. Even though I forget myself, I am not diminished by the forgetting.

I lose myself, only to find myself in a more spacious continent. “Love never ends.”

Excerpted from J. Budziszewski’s book, On the Meaning of Sex.