English
EspañolWould you build your house on quicksand? If you want a solid marriage, do not have it founded upon what “comes and goes.”
Text
“Nothing is more volatile, precarious and unpredictable than desire. The decision to marry should never be encouraged unless the couple has discerned deeper reasons that will ensure a genuine and stable commitment.” (The Joy of Love, n.209)
Commentary
The intimate and lifelong union between husband and wife cannot be based on passing impulses, romantic desire, or sexual attraction. While the stage of falling in love is enchanting, due to the encounter of two intimacies, the excess of emotion and sensuality can cloud the judgment regarding the decision to marry.
The wedding party celebrates the bride and groom´s transformation into an intimate union of life and love, a new way of being. They are no longer two, each their own separate master. Now they are as one, without annulling their individualities. This union makes them become a single “we” in their new destiny. Furthermore, this union is the deepest one possible. It carries the most intimate love that gives life to children; it is the strong nucleus of a warm, solid, and stable home.
The conjugal covenant, which is at the heart of a wedding, is a joint, free and unconditional decision by which the man and the woman surrender and embrace each other faithfully and forever.
This joint foundational will, which they manifest at the wedding, is the ultimate expression of giving and embracing each other in lifelong fidelity. It is an act of superior love. Since it is love, it must be free of conditions, interests or economic benefits, fears and coercions, severe mistakes, and simulations. Since it is a union of love, both spouses unite their individual future in a single joint future, in all that comes: health and sickness, poverty and wealth, the pleasant things, the difficult and sacrificed ones.
This profound and definitive way of uniting cannot settle on shifting sands, passing motives, short-lived impulses, or imaginary mirages. It needs a conscious and mature will, in both spouses, to become a complete union, but also the commitment to preserve the union, to make it grow, and to restore it -every day if necessary- from routines, wounds, and risks of disunity. Therefore, a marriage does not end with the wedding; it begins there.
