Romantic love is typically blind; we feel it for those we don’t really know. And it tends to be very me-oriented. I love her because of the way I feel when I’m with her; because I have fun when I’m with her; because I find her beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, and so on. A more mature love comes when we care more about that person’s happiness than we do our own selfless love that parents show toward children, a willingness to do without so that the child or our mate can do with. Romantic love drives us to be with the other person at all costs; mature love drives us to want to see the other person happy, even if that means not being with us. “If you love somebody, set them free,” as Sting famously sang.
“Love is wanting to possess the good forever.” This “possession” of the good is not the satisfaction of selfish desire in a superficial eros, which values the beloved for what he or she provides to the one who loves, but is instead a relationship to the beloved that draws the one who loves toward the beloved as a free-standing good. Someone who loves seeks “giving birth in beauty,” either to children or to ideas and virtue. Love opens itself to the eternal by extending the love of parents to their children or by building virtue and love of what is transcendent in the one who loves.
Reflecting on the refinement of romantic love in the context of the Christian tradition, Pope Benedict XVI comments that “love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy,” not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving.”
No comments:
Post a Comment