A Short(ish) Digression about Love

I love the traditional Catholic movement: the dedication to the beautiful Mass of Ages, the claiming of our glorious musical patrimony, the study of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, the parental responsibility of educating children, the pursuit of virtue and the rejection of vice, the dusting off of old treasures and the fashioning of new. I was a latecomer to tradition although I studied Thomas at theology school. It was only after meeting the Edinburgh FSSP Mass community that I realized I was at last at home.

Sadly, toxins have seeped into the great river of the traditionalist movement, among them different forms of spiritual abuse. A particularly horrible one is people using their spiritual authority (real or imagined) to convince women that God wants them to join a particular religious order despite the women’s reluctance. If they don’t hand over their lives and wills to this group, they are told, God will almost certainly send them to hell. A related one is convincing a man or woman that he or she ought to marry someone, not because he or she loves him or her devotedly, but because someone seems to have God’s stamp of approval. “Love will come later,” say these self-appointed seers, as if there were not a million forces in society devoted to breaking loveless marriages apart.

I have long been wary of the post-Vatican II tendency to make young people obsess over “their vocations” by which they mean their future state in life. It was once more of a whole life process. Catholic mothers raised their daughters to become good wives but gave an ear to suggestions that certain daughters might be acceptable or amenable to religious life. Catholic fathers raised their sons to become good husbands but considered clerical suggestions that certain sons might flourish in minor seminary. According to traditional thought, the Catholic child was on a path to marriage until God (through both personal conviction and the community) called him or her to something more special.

A childlike notion of vocation is the idea and hope that God literally calls a boy or girl to a religious vocation in the same way He called Samuel, i.e. audibly, waking him or her up in the middle of the night. I say “childlike” not “childish” both because I believe that does actually sometimes happen and because the child has not grasped that vocation is a falling in love.

“I want to be with these guys,” is how one male religious I know expressed it to the woman religious who was driving him around from order to order. She was mildly miffed, if I remember the story correctly, because she had set up several more appointments with vocations directors. However, the young man was adamant: he wasn’t joining just any order of male religious and he didn’t want to see any more. He was joining these guys. He had fallen in love with their life, with their community, their mission. And, well against the odds, he is still with them.

I note that this male religious knew as a teenager that he wanted to become a priest. He sought out trusted older people who could make this a reality, and he visited more than one community before falling in love with the last. In the same way, most Catholic boys or girls in faithful families (and with careful parents) grow up looking forward to getting married and having children of their own. They take advice from trusted older people on the subject, and they get to know several members of the opposite sex before making their choice.

In the West, there is a certain independence from one’s birth family built into marriage; a young man wants to be master in his own home and to set up his wife as its mistress; he doesn’t want to play second-fiddle to his father, and he doesn’t want his wife to become his mother’s kitchen slave. Ideally, he and she remain cherished members of their birth families, of course, and their children grow up knowing their grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins. However, marriage and family involve not only faith but cultural expectations. A major cultural expectation in Western marriages is that young men and women are in love–and no “whatever ‘in love’ means” about it–when we marry. A husband and wife are–must be–both lovers and best friends.

Real love is friendship set on fire. The fire, of course, is sexual attraction. But sexual attraction burns out without the fuel of friendship, of mutual admiration. This is why I advocate that men and women–not just Catholics–befriend/date only those members of the opposite sex who share their core values. An animal-loving vegan might feel sexually attracted to the handsome heir to a butcher shop, but they’d be miserable married. Better for the animal lover that she marry the most sexually attractive vegan who takes an interest in her. Needless to say, she shouldn’t marry just any vegan, even if he’s the only other vegan in town.

Catholics are at an advantage in that our core values are those most conducive to a happy marriage. However, in the West we are at a disadvantage in that we live in a “try living together first and see” culture—not to mention a culture that totally misses the point of Romeo and Juliet (hero and heroine shared the same class, culture, and religion, and thus were perfectly matched, and the stupid thing keeping them apart was their parents’ sinful feud) and worships sex.

Half Scottish-Canadian myself, I’m very much at home married to a Scot in Scotland (although there are still some culture clashes even there), and I would advise anyone else to think very carefully about how to negotiate opposed cultural expectations in marriage and family life. As a Catholic, I share Catholics’ distaste for the world’s obsession with “sexual fulfilment,” but at the same time, I must acknowledge that the marital act is a very important part of marriage. Not to put a fine point on it, I could not imagine going to bed even once, let alone for decades, with someone to whom I was not attracted. Having to hide my disgust, lest I hurt my poor spouse, would be a terrible strain, too.

I suppose it would be better than starving to death, but happily women no longer have to choose between a distasteful marriage and grinding poverty. Catholics value chastity in continence very much, so there should be no pressure to fear displeasing God by delaying marriage until one has find a person one very much wants to marry.

I know lovely, happy, and devout Single people who belong to this category. They’re 40, or 50, and open to marriage, but they just haven’t met the right person. I don’t worry about them much. I do worry about young people deluding themselves (or being pressured) into thinking they must pick their spouse NOW! NOW! NOW! despite not having fallen in love. In fact, I pray earnestly almost every Sunday for Singles that they not fall victim to temptation or panic but wait for God’s Holy Will.

I fell in love with my husband within a few days of meeting him in person, even though when first I laid eyes on him I decided we were going to be only friends. He was short (!), bearded(!!) and wore a tweed jacket of excessive loudness (!!!). Within a few days, though, I began to think wistfully that this highly amusing, very popular, obviously intelligent, devout Trad Catholic man needed a nice Trad Catholic girl to take care of him. Very soon after, I decided I wanted to become that nice Trad Catholic girl. We were married seven months later.

We still enjoy shocking people by telling them that.

“But we were old,” we qualify.

Painting: Vasili Pukirev, Unequal Marriage, 1862, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. Detail.