The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination by Caroline J. Simon

Author:Caroline J. Simon [Caroline J. Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-13T07:57:00+00:00

What Is Marital Love?

The answer to the question What is marital love? may seem too obvious to be interesting. Marital love is that love which is characteristic of and appropriate between spouses. The apparent simplicity of this answer is deceptive. Gordon Graham has given the following definition of marriage: "Marriage ... [is] ... a relationship of sexual fidelity to one member of the opposite sex entered into voluntarily, unconditionally, and for good, regardless of how the future, including the future of the relationship, may go." 21 Such a relationship might be entered into for a variety of reasons, many of which have little or nothing to do with love. In earlier periods in the West, and in a variety of other places up to the present time, marriage has been a matter of family continuity, economic necessity, or social stability, and love was not necessarily part of the picture. In our present culture people usually enter into marriage because of love and expect that love will be an ongoing aspect of marriage. As we saw above, Caraway lists among the elements of romantic love not only idealization but also the passion for union. In our culture it is this passion for union that usually supplies the motivation for making a commitment to sexual fidelity. Romantic love may be the usual impetus for marriage, but this does not go very far in providing an answer to the question of whether it, or some different kind of love, is appropriate to a relationship of voluntary commitment to sexual fidelity.

In order to explore this question, let us begin with Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick's concept of a we, which can be used to give a more full-orbed account of marriage than the definition given by Graham. A we is, in Nozick's view, the natural fruition of romantic love:22 "However and whenever infatuation begins, if given the opportunity it transforms itself into continuing romantic love or else it disappears. With this continuing romantic love, it feels to the two people that they are united to form and constitute a new entity in the world, what might be called a we. "23 The defining features of a we are

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