English
EspañolIf you have not matured as a person, neither has your capacity to love. Professional achievements or simply growing older does not equate to emotional maturity. Does that capricious and self-centered child still remain within you?
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“An unhappy childhood or adolescence can breed personal crises that affect one’s marriage. Were everyone mature and normal, crises would be less frequent or less painful. Yet the fact is that only in their forties do some people achieve a maturity that should have come at the end of adolescence. Some love with the selfish, capricious and self-centred love of a child: an insatiable love that screams or cries when it fails to get what it wants. Others love with an adolescent love marked by hostility, bitter criticism and the need to blame others; caught up in their own emotions and fantasies, such persons expect others to fill their emptiness and to satisfy their every desire.” (The Joy of Love, n.239)
Commentary
To mature means moving from the need to be loved to the capability of loving. The affectively mature person does not have himself – his desires, whims, and wants – as his priority. He who loves is capable of preferring the good of his loved ones to the egocentric satisfaction of himself.
The classics understood that personal virtues were the best practical and effective method to mature as a lover. To develop habits of justice, temperance, generosity, prudence, respect, kindness, patience, listening, compassion and mercy, among others. Lovers are virtuous in loving each other; otherwise, their relationships soon deteriorate.
In order to overcome the egocentric tendency, it is necessary to exercise all these tools to promote open and honest communication among the spouses, which makes confidence and understanding between them possible, thus avoiding that greater conflicts or resentments cause more damage to the wounds they initially wanted to heal. No family member (in the past) has been prepared to communicate well as spouses and to resolve conflicts. Our youth‘s so-called “sex education” is reduced to coital mechanics and contraception. With such poor and unfocused knowledge, it is impossible to establish a conjugal union, keep it alive, overcome the trials of cohabitation and those that life brings, educate children, and know how to reconcile distances.
This maturity, wisdom, and artistry of good and true love must be learned and exercised to establish a marriage that guarantees a deep, harmonious, and prosperous union for life.
