English
EspañolA happy marriage is possible. It always is. Can this happiness be measured as a heaped spoonful or tablespoon? This depends on the means and resources – their quality and perseverance – that both spouses put into their union of love. It depends on how much work they put into preserving it, making it grow, restoring it after the wear and tear, routines, and fatigue harm it, and healing its wounds; how well they live together each day with greater tenderness and mutual mercy. To do all this together and united is to love each other “happily” and in a large amount. It gives both of them the joy of love.
Text
“We often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love, and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation.” (The Joy of Love, n.36)
Commentary
Can a marriage be happy? Of course. Is a marriage not two people, man and woman, united as husband and wife, and is a person, whether male or female, not capable of being happy? Of course, they are. Well, the same rings true for their marriage.
Is “happy” the correct term? Not if by happiness we mean complete and constant physical and psychological well-being. According to such consideration, no one can be happy because even the luckiest person on the planet might catch the annoying flu, injure his ankle while playing his favorite sport, or receive an unexpected tax audit. However, if, more rigorously, we understand by marital happiness that mutual conviction of spouses according to which their union of love “is worth their while” and together they are achieving, albeit with the necessary effort and overcoming trails, a “successful life,” then this “happiness” is possible and even frequent.
We must stop presenting marriage as an abstract idea of perfection, attainable only for a select few. Marriage is a path of real and possible happiness, by which husband and wife decide to unite their lives and destinies, their goodness, and their miseries. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in misfortune. From their imperfection, they commit to love and help each other.
From the marital union and its love comes the fruitfulness that puts life in everything and radiates inside and out of the family. Children are the supreme and exemplary paradigm of fruitfulness that flows from being a union of love.
God´s blessing to the fruitfulness of marriage, the “be fruitful and multiply,” was given to the loving union of the spouses; for such a union of love is, in itself, good to the highest degree, because in it there is an image and likeness of the communion of love which is the Trinity. Thus, the goodness of paternity and maternity is not something prior to or even independent of the conjugal union. On the contrary, paternity and maternity are rooted in the union of conjugal love, and children are their supreme fruit.
Moreover, each child is a unique personal being with an unconditional and definitive worth. Parents provide the “genetics,” the human genealogy of their unique human organism. But God creates their unique personal spirit. We speak of procreation and never mere reproduction of a species by such joint action. Due to the dignity of his personal condition, each child justly deserves to be born from the conjugal love of their parents; they do not deserve a unilateral parental origin that lacks love or the anonymity of one or both of his parents.
For this reason, marriage is not only oriented toward procreation. Children are an incarnation of their parents’ conjugal, fruitful, and generous love. It is the union of conjugal love which, in itself, is open to procreation. To reproduce without conjugal love is proper to the animal species.
