English
EspañolWho does not want a stable marriage and a happy family? The question is, what do we do to achieve it? A specific preparation is essential, one with a content that anticipates the cycles and stages of family life. For marriage and family are not, essentially and solely, a reproduction unit for the human species, nor the primary cell of the social organism. Neither are reproduction or the global society the most important and culminating aspects of life. What is essential and worthwhile is the gift of oneself, embracing another, and becoming together a union of love, which is then the most profound way of being and living together.
Text
“…the decision to marry and to have a family ought to be the fruit of a process of vocational discernment.” (The Joy of Love, n.72)
Commentary
A not uncommon mistake is to view getting married and having a family as a “routine degree,” a sort of “established stage of life” or a “social convention” that would be part of a law-abiding citizen’s resume. I hear among many young people around me that they view marriage as the next step they should take, such as finishing a degree and obtaining a professional title.
Instead, conceiving the project of marriage and family as a vocation, as the most crucial personal enterprise we can undertake – not as something that is part of the natural cycle of our living species – will open us to the personal universe of love. We will be intensely motivated by the desire to learn to love. To attain the ability or maturity for intimate, whole, and sincere reciprocal gift and embrace. To acquire those inner strengths – the virtues – which are the energies of good and authentic love. Furthermore, in learning true love, we will be opened to its culmination´s landscape, which for both of us is to become a single intimate union of life and love.
