The Disciplined Heart - Chapter 5

When I think of love, my mind usually jumps first to romance, so I had to force myself not to skip ahead to this chapter on romantic and marital love. I'm going to split the discussion here into 2 parts (romantic and marital love), as trying to condense without totally losing the point is tricky and I want to try to do at least a little justice to Simon's thinking on the topics.

The first question is, of course, are romantic love and marital love two different things? In the context of destiny, Simon seems to say yes. Romantic love, when seen as a preamble to marriage (which it may or may not be) still involves two unique destinies, whereas in marriage the added dimension of shared destiny comes into play.

So what is romantic love? In Simon's view it involves seeing the other as embodying ideal manhood or womanhood. This idealization is complex, and could very easily lend itself to fiction making. Particularly if we buy into the standards set by popular culture, which are largely oppressive. I don't know that we can fully escape cultural ideals of masculinity and femininity, but this seems to be a point at which it would be crucial to seek awareness and dialogue with scriptural renderings of manhood and womanhood to find a better vision. Ideal manhood/womanhood is also highly person relative... thank goodness we're not all looking for the exact same thing!

A healthier sort of idealization, fueled by imaginative insight into the other's destiny, “attributes to the beloved positive features that the beloved in fact has and knows about, contributes to increased self-awareness by making the beloved aware of positive features that the beloved previously did not know he or she had, or motivates the beloved to acquire positive characteristics on order to grow into the lover’s view of him or her.” (116)

Again, love requires some degree of knowledge of the other person as they are. To avoid false idealization, we must be sufficiently aware of the capabilities and desires of the other person - their own view of their destiny. For example, my own concept of ideal manhood includes high intelligence and pursuit of knowledge. So if I meet a great guy who is super smart but hates the book learnin' (I'm not saying that intelligence is determined by reading, but I like the bookworm sort), the mismatch between ability and proclivity would force me to either reshape my ideal or take a pass on the relationship. Otherwise it's highly likely that I'll create a no-win situation, forcing the guy to either pretend to be something that he's not or live with the knowledge of being a disappointment in that area. Ditto if a guy were to include a superabundance of docility in his ideal of womanhood. There, the capability issue would come to the fore.

This brings us to another important point that Simon makes: In a healthy romantic relationship, both the ideal and the beloved undergo growth and change. The dynamic would hopefully work out so that as you grow to admire more things in the other, your ideal would be shaped by him/her, while at the same time your appreciation of those qualities would encourage him/her to move more fully into them. Of course, as my dad likes to say, we all have our outhouse ways, so the negative qualities definitely factor in. How isn't particularly addressed by Simon, which is a sad oversight as I can't imagine any love that doesn't deal with the realities of our weaknesses. That would be merely illusion.

So next week we'll look at marital love, and as a precursor to that I'll leave you with a quote from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

Whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.