Married Love

In this photo a wedding band is placed in the fold of a bible. The light is hitting the photo from an upper angle casting a heart shadow of the ring onto the bible. The passage is foretelling what love is. Love is sacred. If something is done out of love... there is no shame.

‘Married Love’ is number nine in Supreme Pontiff Paul VI order and structure of human life in “Humanae Vitae”. To generalize Paul VI’s explanation on married love: it is human, highly valuable because two people marry one another to come together and attain their human fulfillment where one is to remain faithful and be there for one another will death do they part. He explains the importance of married love and the reasons why people should value it as something sacred. Although I am not a Catholic or a Christian, I would like to voice my personal opinion of what “Married Love” has come to be (in our 21^st century) and how very little relationships nowadays fully intertwine into marriage revolve around ‘unconditional love’ whereas other types of obstacles have brought people together taking the vows of marriage in regards to ‘security love’ and ‘sympathy love’.

Focusing on the Pope and what he is advocating about, I respect his explanation on ‘Married Love’ and how he believes it should be laid out to be. I believe he is trying to argue that every person in this world seeks a significant other and unconditional love when the time is right for marriage and children. When we do find it in someone we want to spend the rest of our life with it should be valued as sacred and I like how he ends this with, “Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare”. The reason why we get marry is because we love someone unconditionally, we wish to build a future together, and embrace what we can bring to the world… children. The choice of having children is optional but that depend on who you are marrying. Because he is a Pope he speaks of married love as a morally right aspect on marital relationships consisting of man and woman. I respect that the Pope encourages us to marry out of love and value what marriage can bring forth. A successful marriage is a happy marriage. He does not speak on behalf of homosexual relationships in this section but my say on this, in reference to ‘married love’, is that homosexual relationships may find love and marry out of love but what these relationship lacks is reproducing your own offspring. It is impossible and there is nothing that can be done about that.

Let’s now fast forward to the 21^st century and talk about ‘married love’ and the consequences that happen to jeopardize what the Pope specifically stated in his passage on this subject. Very little people nowadays wed out of unconditional love. People nowadays do not even value what marriage is supposed to be and do not even get married at all. People who are married have affairs and the divorce rates are sky rocket flying versus thirty to fifty years ago! I know I cannot speak on behalf of all women or men so to voice my person thoughts I hope not to offend anyone. I see that people nowadays marry out of three reasons and they are: unconditional love, security love, and sympathy love. The unconditional love is the closest kind of love that the Pope is talking about. Whatever happens through thick and thin, sickness and in health, you two are there for each other no matter what fate throws at you. Security love is when you marry a person for the sake of security. A lot of women nowadays marry older men for security reasons and I find that pretty low of a woman to do so and foolish to marry a man because of what he HAS versus what he IS to you. Men probably do the same thing too but just to throw this out there we know it has some truth to it. The third kind of love… honestly I did not really know what best word would help describe it but I feel the best word is sympathy. Sympathy love is the love that makes two people stick together because of something such as unplanned pregnancies with someone you did not really intentionally expect or just marrying people because you feel the need to be responsible for them. You may or may not grow to love that person due to whatever reasons you have but overall you just deal with it because you feel responsible I guess.

As Renee Descartes puts it in his work from Mediation Two; representational theory separates the mind from the real world. Ideas and the things they represent are separate from each other because our beliefs are based on what we see and understand indirectly from the world. It is possible for these ideas to constitute either accurate or false representations but how we really choose to believe and act upon is what we see suitable. These three types of “Married Love” is not really the ideal description that the Pope addressed. The one that comes closest to the Pope’s description would just be the first one. However marriages have their ups and downs. Marriages can work out or fall apart depending on what both people are willing to put in effort to make things work. For sure we know that the word FAITHFULNESS goes only so far to a certain extent and the type of ‘married love” that lasts till death do we part is one of a kind. Times are changing and because times are changing, people’s definitions and reasons are changing too. Everyone comes from different backgrounds and we all do not think the same although we may share same moral beliefs.