What Saint John Paul II is Teaching Me About Love

Over the past seventeen years, I have thought, and read, and talked a LOT about love. It seemed pretty obvious pretty soon that different people had different understandings of what love was.

The most common understanding is that love is something that just happens to you, randomly and magically, an irresistible force that sweeps over you and cannot be controlled or tamed or even understood. Most love songs and movies push this idea very insistently. This idea of love works with divorce, adultery and gay marriage and even polyamory, because 'you can't help whom you love'. It seems like it could be quite tragic too, when you love someone who can't love you back, or you are trapped in a loveless marriage, and your life seems ruined.

Then there is the much more practical understanding of love which states that love is a choice, not a feeling. You can choose whom you love. Arranged marriages are built on this premise - that you choose to love the person you are married to. You find someone whom you are somewhat compatible with, and you make it work.

Then there are the cynics who don't believe in love at all. According to them, love is a purely biological mating drive, neurons firing and hormones releasing, your body fooling you into making lifelong commitments, which are destined to failure.

There are seeds of truth in all these ideas, but all of them leave me with unanswered questions.'

- If love is something that happens to you, then how can you promise to love someone forever?
- How do you know if you have missed your soulmate because they or you made a mistake?
- Or what's to prevent you from meeting someone better suited to you after marrying someone else?
- How can you know it is love and not just attraction?
- If love is just a choice, does it make absolutely no difference whom you marry since you can make it work with anyone?
- If it's just biological, how have we seen so many examples of long-lasting and sacrificial and faithful marriages?

More practically, when it came to deciding whether I should marry my boyfriend,

- How could I know the feelings I was feeling would last?
- On days when I didn't feel crazy in love, did it mean I didn't really love him?
- Was what I was feeling AS magical as everyone else's descriptions and experiences of love?
- What if married life became mundane or boring?
- Did I love him as much as he deserved to be loved?
- What if we faced a major crisis in our marriage like losing a child or a job or severe postpartum depression, and one of us changed a lot, became withdrawn or angry? Would we have what it takes to keep going?
- Would our different cultural backgrounds and difference in our personalities weaken our love at some point?

I had some answers, but I wanted clarity. When I went on my silent retreat, I decided to read excerpts of Saint John Paul's Love and Responsibility (because I didn't have the book, and I found a pdf with excerpts online.)

Saint John Paul (1920 -2005) had also studied and thought deeply about all these questions. He had worked with many young couples, and realized the need to speak about and explain the Christian understanding of love. So here are some of the quotes that answered the deepest questions of my own heart and gave me the confidence and courage to say yes to an authentic love.

'Love in human relationships is not something ready-made. It begins as a principle or idea which people must somehow live up to in their behavior.'

Romcoms kept whispering the lie that LOVE is a noun. But JP2 says love is not a finished product, or an unchanging reality. It is more a verb than a noun, something that is always a process, that is becoming what it should be, especially at the beginning of a relationship. It isn't a done deal, but a promise.

'Love between persons is essentially a creation of human free will.'

I loved this because it puts the power back into our hands. We are not just victims to whom things happen, we have POWER to create and sustain something beautiful. I don't have to hang back wondering, "What am I experiencing? Is it enough?" I can instead choose to pour myself into this relationship.

'There must be a direct attraction to the person: in other words, response to particular qualities inherent in a person must go with a simultaneous response to the qualities of the person as such, an awareness that a person as such is a value, and not merely attractive because of certain qualities which he or she possesses.' 

Attraction IS important. But it can't be just "I'm attracted to your long hair, and your kindness, and your intelligence, and your honesty." I have to be attracted to the PERSON himself, to see him not just a collection of traits but as a unique unrepeatable creation of God.

'It is not enough to long for a person as a good for oneself, one must also, and above all, long for that person’s good.'

If my primary focus is on how the other person makes me feel, I have not yet reached true love. Love means desiring the other person's good, wanting THEM to be holy and happy and fulfilled.

'Love is by its very nature not unilateral but bilateral, something ‘between’ two persons, something shared. Fully realized, it is essentially an interpersonal, not an individual matter. It is a force which joins and unites.'

This differentiates real love from infatuation or crushes or unrequited 'love'. It is not just feelings I have, or attraction or admiration, or a desire or longing for another person. It only becomes LOVE when it is shared, when it is reciprocal, when it joins two people. I've met so many people who have been hung up for years on the same person, unable to let go, sure that there must be something there because of their feelings. But that isn't love, but an unhealthy attachment, and such people were made for something better - someone who will receive and return their love.

'People should always carefully ‘verify’ their love before exchanging declarations.'

That is why I didn't want to say the words "I love you" even though I felt an attraction and desire and sense of belonging to my boyfriend. I wanted to make sure the words I was saying were based on truth, not just the emotion of the moment. I'know people who have been badly hurt by others using those words, without having made a firm commitment to follow through on them.

'Sympathy is a manifestation of experience rather than of activity: people succumb to it in ways which they sometimes find incomprehensible themselves, and the will is captured by the pull of emotions and sensations which bring two people closer together regardless of whether one of them has consciously chosen the other.'

JP2 uses the word 'sympathy' here to mean affinity, a feeling or experience of attraction. I think in many ways THIS is what people talk about when they say they 'fell in love'. It IS an experience that can just happen to one. It doesn't happen with everybody, but it could happen with more than one person over a lifetime. 'There's something about the way you look tonight, the turn of your head, the sweetness of your smile, the flash in your eyes as you look at me.' This actually can be very beautiful, and can in many ways supply the spark to start a fire.

'Mere intellectual recognition of another person’s worth, however wholehearted, is not love.'

Sympathy or affinity can be missing from a relationship. Just recognizing that someone is a nice person isn't enough to fall in love or build a marriage. My mum used to ask me sometimes, "What about so-and-so? Or so-and-so? Why don't you consider them?" And I used to tell her, "They're nice, but I know for sure there's nothing there."

'Yet sympathy is not by any means the whole of love, any more than excitement and emotion are the whole of a human being’s inner life — it is only one element among others. The most profound, by far the most important element is the will, in which the power to create love in a human being and between people is vested.'

So while sympathy, or affinity, or attraction is important, it is definitely not enough on its own. People have fallen in love multiple times. During tough times or dry times, spouses may have turned to someone else and experienced this sense of excitement and emotion. But is this love? NO, says JP2. So what IS the most important aspect or element? THE WILL! What an amazing superpower we have in the depths of our being - to be able to CREATE love!

'Love between a man and a woman cannot remain on the level of mere sympathy but must become friendship. For in friendship — and here it is unlike mere sympathy — the decisive part is played by the will... [Comradeship] rests on such objective foundations as joint work, common goals, shared concerns, etc. Comradeship gives a man and a woman an objective common interest, whereas sympathy links them only in a subjective way.'

By Bartolomé Esteban Murillo - [2], Public Domain, Link

This is a great way to check whether there is more to a relationship than just attraction. You can't just gaze into each other's eyes forever. You need to become a team, working together towards common goals. That is the beautiful thing about becoming a family and raising children. You are both in it together. But raising children is not the only common goal. You could work together to serve the poor, to make a home, to start a business, to do ministry together. When you are not yet married, you could start a project together (yay wedding planning!). If you do not care about any of the same things, or do not have a common goal, your love may fade. Also, if you're not interested in each other's personal goals and lives and interests apart from each other, that doesn't sound like you are friends.

'The emotions themselves are, as experience shows, rather fickle... If ‘love’ remains just sensuality, just a matter of ‘sex appeal’, it will not be love at all, but only the utilization of one person by another, or of two persons by each other... There can be no question of slurring over or neglecting the ‘sexual’ values to which the senses and emotions react. Our concern is simply to bind these values tightly to the value of the person, since love is directed not towards ‘the body’ alone, nor yet towards ‘a human being of the other sex’, but precisely towards a person.'

This understanding of love does not diminish the importance of emotions, sexual attraction and desire. But it says that we need to 'bind these values tightly to the value of the person', so that all these aspects are integrated into a commitment and responsibility to a PERSON, not just a desire that any warm body could satisfy. If someone better looking, more attractive, holier, better qualified, less demanding, and more fun showed up and was interested in you, would you still choose THIS person?

'The lover ‘goes outside’ the self to find a fuller existence in another... Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.'

Finally, love becomes love when you surrender yourself to another person, when you make a commitment, when you make a mutual gift of yourselves, when you allow yourself to be vulnerable to another person. You cannot stand in the doorway forever, but have to cross the threshold. If either of you is holding back, it will never become real love.

'The greater the feeling of responsibility for the person the more true love there is... The strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles, when his or her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the other’s shortcomings and faults, and without in the least approving of them.'

The sooner the disillusionment comes, the better. Even better if we start without illusions, when we are able to see each other as we really are, with both our strengths and weaknesses, our heroic moments, and our shameful failures. Because your reaction will show you how far you have progressed in love, or if it still superficial or selfish. Have you seen your beloved's sins come into the open? "I still love you and I will help you to get up again and move forward." That is the response of love.

So what am I learning about love? That I can confidently say to my bridegroom on our wedding day "I will love you and honour you all the days of my life" not because I'm sure I've hit the jackpot, but because I have chosen him, and he has chosen me; and because we both have been given the superpower of being able to renew and create love every day; and because God is love, and we both have recourse to Him to aid us in this vocation.

Related Reading

The Proposal

How (And Why) Not to Fall in Love

How to Love Well - Some Practical Tips

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