Love and Marriage

Nota: Puede leer este escrito en español aqui!
Gracias a mi viejo amigo que lo tradució y publicó en la revista virtual de este pais.

I was away in a little Mexican town, and had no electricity what so ever, this provoked that I started writing a bit, the following text is the result of the writings that I did in this lovely little Mexican town.

The phrase home sweet home is usually one of many fallacies that exist related to a married household, Tolstoi described it as hell, and I give him credit for this. Considering that both humans that decided to conform this marriage are normally not all that benevolent and are inclined to be a bit neurotic, why should they suddenly turn into angles after they were wed?
If we ears dropped on any married household we are certain to hear a number of nasty fights.

Furthermore if we started to ponder on what it means to select A Partner for the rest of our lives, we reach the following conclusion: When we are selecting a partner, we are placing a bet. Since it is impossible to know what the future evolution of the relationship will be, or what the future evolution of my partner will be.
Although I don’t think that the problem lays on the bet itself, I believe the problem rests in the fact that this selection of the person one will wed is usually not taken as a true decision.
Usually the newly wed have never really thought about what their chances of success with their current partner are . Their attention is usually diverted from the ethical problem, that they have, the bet like characteristic of an election of this kind is diminished by making the newly weds believe that they are together due to destiny, or because they just KNEW that they had to be together. In this way the decision part is completely lost and forgotten.
Since this KNOWLEDGE that they were meant to be, is likely to be imperfect and time limited, it should be placed with a guarantee The only guarantee that could be valid for this situation is the strength of our decision, in which we say that we will be with that person for the rest of our life, no matter what.


The important thing is to be aware that when making a decision of this kind, our decision is tied to a series of unfair situations that might arise and whose consequences we are engaged to assume, we might live happily ever after or we might not.
When choosing to marry someone, we are NOT telling that person, that they are the man or woman from our dreams who fills up all of our desires. That would be a lie we are keeping a mere illusion of that person, I am sure that after a few weeks of living with that individual and seeing them day in and day out the whole fantasy would be lost.
When choosing someone to marry what we are really saying is:I want to live with you, just the way you are. And what that means is : I have chosen you to share my life with, and that proves that I love you.

A life that is united with mine for a life time. That is the miracle of marriage. A life that wants my well being because it is related to it’s own well being.
So the happiness in a marriage seeks for the well being of the loved one, and when one acts searching for the well being of others, one is following the word of Christ, Jesus Christ said we should love each other. Marriage is the image of love that Christ had. It is a love that is truly reciprocal, We love our partner just the way our partner is, we don’t love love, we don’t love the idea of love, we love our partner without idealization, just like God loves us with the form and limitations we have.

The main conflict that I believe arises in the married couple is that we live in a society, where the kind of love the Jesus Christ invoked and the kind of love in which marriage was established, is currently not a love that is valued.
The kind of love that our society values the most is passionate love.
But what is exactly passionate love?
Passion means suffering ,where destiny has complete power over that person, the person is no longer free or responsible. Passion means loving love more than the object of love, loving passion by itself, it is to love and to seek suffering. Passion-Love: desire for what hurts us and kills us in its triumph .
Love and death, mortal love is what the great majority of our poetry is about, or at least the kind that is the most popular, we see this theme in prose as well; we see it in our best movies, as well as our best songs. A happy love has no story, only mortal love is worth a tale.
We glorify passion, we have great enthusiasms for it, we no longer think of passion as what will hurt, we see it as a more lively life promise, it has a power that transfigures, we see it as something that is beyond happiness and suffering ,a sizzling beatification.
Why do we wish to feel this passion that hurts us even when our reason also condemns it? Why do we long for this love whose bloom can only be suicidal?
Wagner says it is due to our attraction for death, that attraction to know that we are in the limit.
This attraction for death that our society has, might have been influenced by a dualist world conception, this dualist conception sees in life a true tragedy, a disgrace ;but sees in death the ultimate victory , in which the being will be reintegrated to the unit, through death man is ascended to its god. In order to bring our sacrifice, a magnification of our desires is needed.
The kind of love that this dualism conception harvest is a kind of love that denies any kind of earthly love, it also denies any kind of earthly happiness.

Having obstacles is what makes passion grow, having a preference for obstacles is saying YES to death , it is a progress toward a voluntary death. No earthy love can exist because its goal is the search for passion and passion means suffering, it is not about reciprocal love, it is about having a love that is not reciprocal or that agonizes from a series of conflicts.
This kind of conception is completely different to the kind of conception Christianity has, and the kind of conception in which marriage is settled in.
The Christian’s God turned himself into a man, a true man. The salvation of man kind is no longer through death, the Christian’s God, my God, said it was not necessary to distance oneself from this world in order to unite with him, he turned himself into a man and came close to us, he opened up a new door to his Kingdom, in which through sanctification one can enter. Sanctification is completely different to sublimation, which is an elusive getaway from life.
Love is no longer seen as something that one must run away from, or in which obstacles should be found. This kind of love turns and smiles at life. Love is turned into a positive action, a transforming action that is set to the present. It is transforming because through love we will be allowed to enter God’s Kingdome . It is on earth where our destiny is decided. Our salvation is no longer in the other realm, it is no longer in the desire that consumes life, it is here on earth by obeying God’s word.

Marriage is all about loving your partner day in and day out, giving love in the present, loving them just the way they are, I think that the problems marriage has been having are due to that fact that we are influenced by 2 different love perceptions, the Christian love and the dualism love conception. There might be a couple that gets married, but because of the dualism ideas that they may be predisposed to having, they could be seeking ,without knowing it, for obstacles. One of the obstacles in which married couples usually fall for, is infidelity.
I truly believe that faithfulness in our society, is seen as the least natural of all virtues and the one that brings the less happiness. They think that the success of a marriage is the result of an inhuman effort. They consider that faithfulness is an imposed discipline by an absurd or cruel ideal. We have the habit of exploring each situation to its maximum, without having any mechanisms that judge the situation. The acquired respect to the social system is what keeps the idea of faithfulness. Even when the obstacle is not that difficult to overcome, we find excuses to surrender to it.

I believe that to overcome this problem, or any kind of problem that might arise in a marriage, we should first of all follow Jesus words with all of our heart, and second of all we should have the will to carry out a project. This project is to have a constant need to act for the loved one, wishing to govern the real world and not escape it. This project allows us to build a true master piece and it gives us the opportunity of having glory through it.

I hope that understanding the context of where different kinds of love originated from, can help us be more aware of how we act, and allow us to take a true decision in our love lives of what kind of love we wish to pursue.