How Deep is Your Love?

We have been engaged for a few years and now we feel that the moment to get married has arrived. Nevertheless, we are both a bit scared. Our parents are separated, as are many of our friends after only a few years of marriage. Will we be able to be faithful to one another for the rest of our lives? Wouldn’t it be better to have a trial period first, live-in and verify if our love is a solid one?

Your apprehension is understandable. To enter into a marriage nowadays is getting more and more complicated, especially in our society where everything is readily available, instant gratification being the norm rather than the exception, which thus leaves no room for definitive or lasting choices.

But despite this bleak scenario, there still are marriages that last forever. It is, after all, an adventure. No one knows what lies ahead; no one knows what will happen next. The thrill of this adventure is in discovering and going ahead together. You should understand that man complements woman and vice versa. One completes the other, and so one can only go ahead with the other beside him/her. This diversity is what attracts man and woman to each other and this too will be what will sustain and help the marriage along on this adventure.

A love that lasts a lifetime is something that the couple has to work at. The engagement period is where you should be able to verify genuine possibilities, risks involved and whether there is an underlying agreement between these. Perhaps this is why you desire to verify if your love for one another is solid or not with this trial period where you would live-in together. However, going over the statistics for separated couples, it shows that there is no difference between those who have lived together before marriage and those who did not. Living-in with one’s partner doesn’t necessarily eliminate the risks of an eventual break-up. This is so because the marriage pact creates a completely different situation, making both partners aware of the new and special commitment they have assumed toward their partner and towards society.

Many couples separate because they are not able to orient themselves towards unity, being one cohesive whole, while respecting and valuing individual differences. Eventually, these differences are capitalized, emphasized and are eventually blamed for the failure when, ironically, these are the same things that attract the partners to one another. Also, more and more couples today confuse love and sentimentalism as one and the same. They are misled to believe that emotion, passion or sex are love.

Instead, real love is a continuous attentiveness to the other person, a search for that part of him still unexplored – because people will keep evolving during their lifetime – in a perpetual starting over again without ever giving up. Love basically presupposes freely giving of oneself, without waiting to be repaid. Reciprocity may happen, but this often depends on our being disinterested or being without any ulterior motive. Love requires a total commitment. Therefore, what is needed is time, a lifetime. As with any other work of art, love too needs time in order to become concrete and renew itself continuously.

Only in this way can we experience that joy which comes from welcoming or accepting one another without limits, expectations and pretenses.

If you do decide to get married in church (with all the enormous potential contained in the Sacrament), you will gradually feel the presence of God Himself for as long as you are able to make room for Him in your marriage. He will become an irreplaceable companion on your journey.

Wouldn’t this be a beautiful adventure?

Raymond and Mary Scott with Jenni Bulan

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Beyond A Sexy Appearance

After our second child, I gained a lot of weight, and although I decided to slim down with different courses and readings, I’ve not been able to lose much. What really worries me is that this problem is causing a crisis in my marriage. What can you suggest?
A.R.

A first and quite simple psychological approach I can suggest for a “natural slimming down” method is to imagine how full one’s stomach would be with the next mouthful we eat, instead of waiting to feel too full after having eaten too much. It’s switching from past to future, or from a sensory experience that one enjoys to another experience, that is, not longer being after the taste of food – and this why many people overeat – but focusing on the feeling of being full, which is a signal for ending a meal.

Now, besides this piece of advice, we must also remember that each time people try to lose weight, they have to consume their body’s reserves of fat and that’s why they will feel hungry or experience unpleasant feelings. What’s more important though is how people handle these sensations. If they consider eating less to be a fast, or a denying themselves the pleasure of food, or punishment for having eaten too much in the past, these unpleasant sensations of hunger will be heightened and it will be even harder for them to lose weight.

But beyond the problem of losing weight and slimming down, let me emphasize a consideration on the “priority” of a couple’s relationship. From a very wide cross-cultural survey in which people were asked what qualities they looked for in a man or woman in their life, it was found that the overwhelming majority of respondents wished goodness, intelligence and understanding – in contrast to great physical presence, money and other things that almost everyone is trying to get to make themselves appealing. Seminars, books and activities that promise the attainment of wealth, beauty and even intelligence are common. Instead rarely are there books and workshops that teach how to become better and more wholesome! If we have a wide range of courses on how to make money and how to become more handsome or beautiful, but very few to learn about kindness and tolerance, it means that many people don’t succeed in their search for what will really make them happy.

Pasquale Ionata

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