Beyond emotional highs…
If your love depends on feelings, it won’t last.
Far too many people build their relationships on sensation.
The rush of attraction, the thrill of being wanted… it intoxicates the hearts!
And when those feelings fade (they always fade) the couple concludes the love is gone.
It isn’t. It never was love to begin with.
It’s what we call sentimentalism, the reduction of love to feeling.
John Paul II offers an antidote to this shallow view in Love and Responsibility.
Infatuation is a beginning, a spark, but not a destination. Our emotions are not stable. They were never meant to carry the full weight of a lifelong commitment alone.
A relationship built on emotional and sensual thrill (as if love was meant to be a never-ending sugar high) is like a fire fed on tinder: bright, fast, and gone.
It creates a spark but does not sustain a fire.
Tinder igniting a spark
What sustains a fire is not more tinder.
It is a log.
A log sustaining large flames.
True love is this log. A kind of love that brings long-lasting fulfillment, like a generous bonfire.
It is NOT the feeling but the act of giving. Not when it’s easy, but precisely when it isn’t. Because love is about willing and doing the good of the other, for their sake. This kind of love doesn’t burn out. It deepens. It becomes the kind of warmth a whole family can huddle around.
JPII goes further than most secular relationship advice dares to go.
The model for human love is not chemistry, or compatibility, or even friendship, as beautiful as these are.
The model is the Trinity.
The Father pours Himself entirely into the Son. The Son returns that love entirely to the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from this perfect exchange. It is a total and unreserved loop of self-giving: a love so complete it is itself a Person.
When a man and woman love in this way, they don’t just experience each other. They enter into something that was happening before the world began.
This is love at its source. Not a relationship that is based on feelings that come and go. But a true betrothed love, which is sacrificial, deeper, and inexhaustible.
So the question is not whether your relationship still gives you butterflies.
The question is whether both of you are becoming the kind of persons that are capable of that love.
Don’t settle for sparks.
Share the story: https://www.starsetnewsletter.com/p/beyond-romantic-love
