In the previous chapter it became evident that personal love is not improvised. It is too great not to require a strenuous process of preparation and formation. Training in the art of love should be initiated in childhood, developed during courtship and culminate in marital life.

Courtship is not a kind of prematrimony in which sexual relations are begun, but a period for shaping all the conditions required to establish a love that is genuine, solid, fertile and happy. The period of courtship should not be wasted on trifles or small consolations, to a greater or lesser degree surreptitious. Effort must be dedicated to clarifying the understanding of everything related to love, to strengthening willpower so as to order values and select the highest, to sharpening sensitivity, to cultivating the noblest sentiments and to practicing fidelity.

Intelligence must serve for something more valuable than pleasure-gaining techniques. It must help one discover that genuine love means a high level of unity, which is mutual engagement, and which admits of various degrees of perfection.

Will power must be strengthened to the point where it is capable of always choosing the value which serves as the ideal in our life, and of creating serious commitments and remaining true to them.

Human sensitivity must be cultivated until it can vibrate in a special way with the highest sentiments, namely, those aroused by the valued relationship. Satisfying an instinct produces a feeling of pleasure in me, which affects me in proportion to its intensity. Apart from pleasure, sharing an aesthetic experience with a friend produces joy. This form of joy or happiness surpasses that engendered by pleasant sounds or delicate colors. It means the spiritual excitement of opening up together to a reality that perfects us. Learning to value kindness, tenderness and simplicity requires time and dedication. The present environment leads us rather to consider as values: aggressiveness, violence, arrogance and a spirit of domination. In the face of apathy towards values it is necessary to stimulate a feeling of enthusiasm and a creative attitude.

Cultivating sensitivity, willpower and intelligence is a decisive task which engaged couples must inevitably carry out. The development of a creative capacity depends on this cultivation, and without creativity no married life is possible. That is why the decline in creativity marks a break in married life. Nowadays we lament the fact that many young people, on principle, reject marriage as a way of life. We can recommend that they keep to the established norms, be loyal to the customs of the family, and not contravene religious rules. But this will be to no avail if young people live on the plane of experiences which are satisfying but barely, if at all, a matter of personal growth or creativity.

Similarly in premarital relations, if young people consider that the essence of married life consists in achieving satisfaction, particularly sexual, they will tend to anticipate these during their courtship. They do not consider this to be a preparatory period in which they have great and important tasks to carry out, precisely with a view to enabling the full scope on the amorous-sexual activity when married.

During a talk on premarital relations a young person asked how far he should go in amorous relations. What is fundamental is not how far one can go, but where one must start from. If you take a dominating attitude with the other person as a means to satisfying your erotic greed and giving you selfish pleasure, you are wrong from the start; your contact with that person is spoiled from the beginning. If your goal is to love the other person and not just to gain satisfaction, you should remember that there are two different rhythms in the process of intimacy with someone. Corporeal intimacy is achieved through a rhythm that can be accelerated; but personal intimacy is achieved according the slower rhythm of a processes of maturing that cannot be accelerated at will. A clock can be made in an afternoon or in an hour. It depends on the rhythm set in the production process. A grain of wheat cannot ripen in an afternoon, neither in a day, or even weeks; its ripening process cannot be forced with impunity from outside. Much less can the rhythm of spiritual intimacy be accelerated at whim. If the rhythm of physical intimacy is accelerated to gain a passing satisfaction without having yet achieved personal intimacy, one’s life is turned upside down, whatever be the moral attitude of those involved. Many relationships between young people fail prematurely due to this upturning.

Naturally, those who form premature "intimate" relationships usually state emphatically that they have personal "intimacy" with the loved one. But they should not fall victim to a mirage, and consider erotic greed as a genuine form of personal love. It is very easy to confuse the interest we feel in satisfying an instinct with the surrender of love to a person. The person who wishes to satisfy an instinctive impulse takes the other person as a means to his end. But a means is valued in the measure in which it serves one’s intentions. In contrast while one who loves a person as such values their qualities positively, that love is above these qualities; one remains faithful under every circumstance: in sickness and in health, in joy and in sadness, in the joyful moments when he admires attractive points, and in the painful instances when he notices faults and defects.

When love is directed to the person, one is on the path where virtues flourish. The person who loves in this way shows very fertile qualities, among which the following stand out:

1. Treating the loved one as a unique reality in the world, irreplaceable and unchangeable.

2. Valuing the loved one in this manner is acting in a trusting manner. When love is self-interested there is fear that giving oneself may mean losing oneself. Generosity frees us from this fear and enables us to give ourselves wholeheartedly, trusting more in the possibility of the encounter than in the risk that the person loved may betray our trust.

3. This liberated being opens tranquilly to the other as "thou", without any trouble whatsoever.

4. Thanks to this the being who opens is sincere and genuine.

5. Genuineness makes one a realist, able to recognize one’s deficiencies and the urgency of perfecting oneself and achieving higher forms of realization.

6. This clarity enables one to see that love develops according to the slow rhythm of ripening, and that this rhythm is different in each being.

7. Recognizing this different manner of being leads to respecting the loved one, allowing them to be what they are and are destined to be.

8. This respect translates into patience, tact, prudence and good judgment. Being patient is not reduced to having stamina. Stamina belongs to walls and columns. One is not built to have stamina, but to be creative and to grow. Patience means adjusting to the rhythm of each being, with a view to establishing a fruitful sphere of co-existence.

9. The fruitfulness of love is proved in its extension into the home, in the increase in the quality of the union between the married couple, and between these and their surroundings, as in giving life to new beings.

10. The high quality of their union avoids regrets and encourages gratitude. The person deeply united to another being feels no regret about the high values the other realizes; on the contrary, they are grateful because they feel enriched thereby.

11. The grateful person is absorbed not in competition, but in healthy emulation.

12. These conditions lead to an attitude of calm tranquillity with the loved one. Those who truly love each other do not feel pressed to be on guard; they know they have created a living space or field of play where everything moves around spontaneously, because the barriers between "mine" and "yours" have been surmounted.

13. This intense communication stimulates the lovers, since it constitutes a source of energy and light.

14. Such uninhibited communication means a deep personal commitment, an intermingling of the two spheres or ambits of life.

15. Such intermingling cannot be fleeting; it is beyond temporal and spatial determination. Marcel noted correctly that true love is unconditional and surpasses the course of time. This is not a mere matter of lasting or perduring, it means constantly creating what once was promised, namely, a very high level of union. This creative capacity is fidelity, which obviously has an infinitely higher meaning than pure stamina.

16. The high quality of love turns it into a great asset, which spreads like light: love spreads, expands and communicates. It takes others to its bosom and enables them to rise to the life that is within them.

17. This spreading and shelter often means sacrifice, but the person who loves truly is able generously to accept all that contributes to increasing love.

These and other qualities are given by true love. The task of the engaged couple must be to endow their incipient love with such conditions and accord them their due worth. How can they tell whether they are on the right path to attain these? There is a very simple test: do they direct their first affection towards the other’s person and not towards the benefit they may get from their friendship with them.

But who can say whether one directs one’s deepest intention towards personal love and not towards one’s own undeniable interests? Persons themselves must have the inner light for this, take distance from their desires to define with honesty whether they are starting to love the person they are courting or are more interested in the pleasure to be derived from one of their qualities.

To carry out this examination, one can analyze the type of caress used to express affection for the person one professes to love. Are they erotic or personal; can one say that they are a declaration of your love, and not just to satisfy one’s erotic greed. Imagine that, at a certain moment, the person being caressed shows displeasure at some gesture which to them seems excessive. How does one react? Is it to try to force their will, to convince them misleadingly that the attitude is justified because it is meaningful? Does one insist on beginning intimate physical relations before having true spiritual intimacy?

These questions suggest that things may be richer and more complex than suspected thusfar. Only when one is seriously prepared to make a commitment for life with someone and mould one’s existence with a common plan can the intimacy be personal.

This is why the person’s question about how far to go was badly phrased. It asked only for a dividing line between the permissible and the non-permissible, without worrying about having a creative attitude towards the loved one. But training for love is not reduced to knowing a few norms and holding to them. It means putting into shape the capacity to love fully. Only when one loves in this way can corporeal intimacy serve as an element to express personal intimacy – not to disturb, but to promote, human relations.

Premarital relations are disturbing and inadvisable because they are premature and lack real meaning. In human life actions which do not express what they signify are destructive. Sex relations touch the soul precisely because they refer to an event of the greatest importance: the committed intermingling of two persons. If such commitment and intermingling do not exist, the sexual act is reduced to mere sexual intercourse, which, seen alone, lacks meaning and therefore becomes literally "non-sense" or absurd.

This initiation of dishonest, deceitful, hypocritical, insincere relations is a bad start for life together and for many reasons:

1. The engaged couple becomes accustomed to taking as definitive the first idea they have of love. Since it is a very precarious idea, their whole relationship is affected by this initial mistake. When they realize that erotic love does not go far, this discovery will provoke in both of them their first disappointment and apathy, then boredom and finally perhaps a break. They will say – as is frequently heard nowadays – that love has finished, and new horizons must be looked for. They do not see that love never existed, but was supplanted by mere eroticism.

2. When eroticism is considered the only form of love, the couple runs the risk of thinking that, by permitting sexual relations, they have already got everything out of each other. They complacently give themselves up to such practices and neglect the immense task they should carry out during courtship to prepare for a real life of love, with all its creativeness and fruitfulness. Pure eroticism is a form of vertigo, surrender to which wipes out one’s creative capacity, reduces sensitivity to the highest values, and prevents one from establishing valuable forms of unity. The fall into erotic vertigo promises everything at first but ends by taking all: it makes preparation for a genuine life of married commitment absolutely impossible.

This preparation involves such important tasks as the following:

- helping oneself to feel enthusiastic about great values;

- learning to be creative together by participating in values and bringing about relevant realities;

- sharing solid ethical criteria;

- building together on high ideals;

- growing accustomed to living dually, to matching one’s rhythm to the vital tempo of the other;

- increasing the capacity to overcome different moments of life and to choose in virtue of the ideal rather than of the whims of each moment;

- opening up to the deep happiness given by loving fully, not just partially;

- confirming day by day that nothing joins people so much as doing good together.

Imagine two engaged couples. One gives themselves up to sexual pleasures. Undoubtedly, they have moments of euphoria, but these pass like a burning flame: they not construct, but leave behind only a few ashes. The other couple also feels the desire to express their love by sexual union; this is a spontaneous movement responding to instinctive impulses. But they know that love is not like hunger which is satiated by eating to restore a vital balance. Food satisfies a basic, elementary, primitive, biological need, whereas the sex relation does not satisfy the need to create a genuine love relationship: it is not sufficient. Hence this couple is patient and strives to lay the foundations for full love, for a deeply united life. In this sexuality will play a role much more relevant than for the first couple because it will be a living expression of a personal relationship that ripens daily. This sexual life, integrated in a personal life of love, will be totally free and therefore happy. The first couple feels free because they put into play a mere freedom of manoeuvre, and move at their fancy. But this is moved by mere appetite, rather than by a clear will to establish a high and difficult form of unity. They lack the freedom to create and develop, and for lack of creative power their sex life cannot lead to personal fulfillment and genuine happiness.

The inner freedom of the second couple enables them, on the one hand, to overcome the desire to take themselves as a means to obtain easy gratifications, and, on the other hand, to devote the time they spend together to discovering worlds of mutual interest, to open up to each other’s fields of attraction, to let themselves be drawn by the values to which the partner is most sensitive. In this way they help each other to perfect themselves as persons, and to have trust, support and security in themselves, because humans feel most support when the loved one opens to our world of values. They learn to look together in the same valuable and valued direction.

People are very united when they discover the powers of initiative in others, collaborate with them, and even open up new possibilities to them. Those who form this sort of relationship strongly intermingle their different spheres of life, not only the affectionate ambit. All too often it is thought that one person is joined to another when they feel attracted and share a certain sphere of affection. This form of union often is no more than the beginning of a life together. Unity is not established suddenly and unexpectedly as in the well known phrase "love at first sight", but requires time and effort. Ultimately this is what guarantees the endurance of the relationship, whereas when this is reduced to sentimental effusion it can sink like a bonfire of dead leaves.

Surrendering to sense indulgence accentuates egoism, centers people upon themselves obsessed with their own interests, does not allow them to turn the different-distant into different-intimate, and ends by launching them into the various processes of vertigo, which dissolve communities and reduce them to mere masses.

One must avoid surrendering to any kind of vertigo, because any one of them may lead you where you do not wish to go. Vertigo experiences should be avoided, not only because they are forbidden and may have been considered taboo in the past, but above all because of their consequences. What is important is that such practices do not enable one to develop properly whereas one must grow in order to reach maturity and fulfillment as the total unfolding of one’s possibilities. A Jumbo jet has enormous power and reaches very high speeds on the runway. Soon it either gains the freedom of flight or crashes into the first obstacle on the ground. The human being is endowed with energy which surpasses the mere biological needs of subsistence and is destined to an extremely high form of free action. One does well to let himself be carried by such drives, but would be foolish to remain on the runway and refuse to rise above to a higher level, for then the energy acquired will not open into free movement, but turn to destruction.

Human tendencies are not mere instinctive forces that start and finish within themselves. They are auxiliary forces of willpower and of capacity to create projects of fulfillment. There are several sources of energy within man: instincts, filial and conjugal love, companionship and friendship, and participation in creative activities, professional work, and every kind of task. Being mature consists in knowing how to integrate these forces in order to attain the great goals toward which the human person is called. To make such forces automatous and give them free play, as though they were a toy with which one can amuse oneself and then quietly leave aside is frivolous; that belongs to a childish stage of development.

All energy that is destined to merge within a meaningful whole becomes a destructive force when taken separately, because then it is distorted and subjected to laws which do not correspond to its nature. Sexual power aligned with a life of love is a source of constructive energy. It is a living expression of an unselfish relationship which, with generosity, can maintain impulses on their proper course. The same sexual force, left at the mercy of an ambition, does not have the resources to regulate itself. It expands freely until attaining the threshold of satisfaction. As sensitivity is deadened by the repetition of stimulae, this threshold has continuously to be elevated in order to keep the same level of excitement. Thus sexual forces turn into sources of extremism and degeneration which are highly destructive.

Taking sexual forces apart from their function in the process of personal love means a change in the natural order, which literally is a "per-version". A perverse activity is not only one carried out with the express object of destroying another person, but is every activity which, by not fulfilling the demands of reality, becomes destructive, even without intending to destroy.

Some hold that the erotic relationship establishes friendship and, by so doing, appears truly constructive and noble. But on going more deeply the concept of a genuine friendship is not reduced to a mere exchange of interests. Erotic caresses may create a very attractive and inviting sphere of pleasure. But should this be called friendship? When at a given moment the other person is unable to give such satisfaction, would they still be loved?

To have erotic relations with no intention of marriage, that is, of committing oneself to a serious and lasting life project, is to play with the sources of life and in the most banal sense. That is, it puts at stake energies destined in the last instance to the creation of a high form of unity and even of new life, without being the least interested in either goal. This game is very dangerous because it represents an attack on reality.

Nowadays the need for ecological respect is stressed, and quite rightly, for the reality around us is our living environment; it is there for us to collaborate with, not to attack. Similarly, on the higher level that is personal life, the laws of human reality cannot be infringed upon with impunity. Sexual potencies are relational, dialogical, destined to be the living expression of, and to foster, relationships of love. To consider them as a mere source of gratification – sense and psychic – is to belittle them. No one has the right to belittle their own reality or that of others.

One intends to marry the one with whom one is on intimate terms. Are you ready at this time to give sex relations their full meaning? If you have the slightest doubt, it is because you would degrade them and prematurely wither a beautiful plant that is barely sprouting. Studies on the meaning of sex life point out that every amorous expression has two distinct and interlinked forms of fecundity: increasing personal love and giving life to new beings. A view of life as a whole shows that the attraction and pleasure of the sexes is one of nature’s resources for achieving the survival of the species and the grouping of human beings in communities of personal love. To reduce this to pleasure and disregard the fruitfulness entailed goes against the flow of the dynamism of reality.

Though one can separate the two aspects, is it sensible to do so? Is human intelligence and freedom to be and to tear apart what nature so obviously has joined together? Often it is claimed that for centuries the married relationship was directed towards procreation rather than towards the encouragement of personal love, and that it is now time to reverse these terms. But the first is not quite true because, by separating love from eroticism, it was put into close contact with personal love. As regards the need to link sex and the fostering of personal love, it is only fair to warn that at present those who would liberate love do not cultivate and defend anything but mere eroticism. Certainly, it is necessary to underline that married love has, as one of its primary aims, the increase of mutual love. But such increase is not achieved by encouraging erotic vertigo.

To discover how all amorous gestures incline towards the two goals indicated, it is sufficient to analyze two facts:

1. All the aspects of erotic play tend to stimulate and bring turbulence to the generative powers. Once this is achieved, their attractiveness declines or even comes to a halt. It is incoherent to separate love and "procreation" and then put all efforts into imagining ways to avoid pregnancy, for obviously this separation violates the natural order. The measures to be taken in virtue of responsible parenthood to avoid conception must be adapted to the normal process of human nature, understanding the nature of man as in itself creative, not just biological.

It cannot seriously be claimed that sex relations constitute a biological activity similar to others such as eating and drinking. Those activities have the goal of satisfying an individual, an untransferable need, whereas sex relations put at stake two people: they surpass the individual sphere and enter the communitary, which is not reducible to satisfying individual instinctive greed. Performing a sexual act without being fully conscious and expressly willing is a violation, a reversal of the correct order.

Sex relations surpass many other human actions in that they are destined to be a living expression of a highly important personal relationship; that is their meaning, it is what they themselves demand. Hence when the sexual relationship is separated from its full meaning, the foundations are laid for all kinds of violence and extremism.

2. Another fact shows clearly the link between sexuality and personal love, namely, the difficulty in not establishing personal ties of affection and commitment with those with whom we have sex relations. The main characters in the film "Last Tango in Paris" have been living together in an apartment for several months. One day the young girl asks her partner, a mature man, "Hey, what’s your name? What’s your real name? We’ve been together a long time and I don’t know your name, nor you mine. . . ." The partner replies brusquely: "Look, young girl. We haven’t come here to ask anything. We came to forget. My name’s none of your concern, nor your’s mine." Of course! Calling someone by their name means engaging their whole person down to its very core. The person who wants to keep relations on an infra-personal level, un-committed and infra-creative, makes an effort not to call the other by their name. But having "intimate" relations and not knowing someone’s name is a contradiction; it is ridiculous, absurd. Hence it brings a shudder to anyone who is the slightest bit sensitive.

In the face of all manipulative misuse, modern ethical research outlines the need to recognize in courtship its true character. López Azpitarte writes.

This noble and fertile form of understanding courtship is not fostered by modern society, but rather is hindered thereby. Various groups, including some which, for institutional reasons, should guide people, mobilize all the means within their reach to incite the practice of pure eroticism, thereby abandoning their function of subjects of history. We know that the subject of history, the one who decides the path of historical events, is not the private individual, but the society. Each society gathers the possibilities transmitted by previous generations and hands them to the persons capable of assuming them so that in their post they can make projects for the future and carry them out. A society which mobilizes its capabilities, for example, for communication and entertainment, books, films transparencies, etc., in order to beguile people with an erotic decoy deprives them of the creativeness it needs, while in the same measure being untrue to its historical function.

Modern society submits children and teenagers to an incessant bombardment of erotic impressions; it spreads among people the vague idea that there is no other love than eroticism. This insinuation is usually well accepted despite its falsehood because it works in favor of the tendency to take the easiest as genuine, even though it may be adulterated. But psychology sees the propensity to satisfy impulses straight away as regressive, a return to the oral phase of infancy. The child experiences the pleasure of sucking early on, and when it cries adults put something tasty into its mouth to quiet it. Any kind of anxiety is calmed with oral pleasure. To gain maturity the child must learn to put up with wants and unsatisfied pulses if necessary in order to attain higher values.

Such relinquishment of immediate satisfaction of instinctive impulses has a beneficial effect when it is an accumulation of vital energy and an application to the determination to create a deep friendship that may generate a union of high quality in marriage. This patient wait frees young people from the risk of having sex relations before reaching the hetero-erotic phase, that is, before being open to the other person. The young person doing this during the auto-erotic phase, directed solely to satisfying their own interests, tends to reduce the partner to a means for one’s ends.

Professor Rudolf Affemann, in the light of his clinical work as a psychiatrist, writes against premature sex relations:

He is not unaware that the wait – at times long – by so many young people for the hour when they join in matrimony is made particularly painful as love grows. It is certainly not easy to enter fully the ambit of love without expressing it fully. We are facing love a real problem. But we should recognize also that often we interpret a less nature attraction as true love when it is no more than mere erotic greed which leads to expressing immediately in sexual form the slightest burst of attraction or affection.

This haste reaches such a point today in the communications and entertainment media that an affectionate relationship that is not rapidly expressed with acts of intimacy is barely understood. The excessive exaltation of sex relations prompts them to be mistakenly considered as the realization par excellence of creative human life. With sights and attention fixed on this narrow horizon, many people wind up being obsessed with sex and lose sight of other fine and fruitful fields of activity.

Exactly the opposite is what should be recommended. To live sexuality in a balanced and full way, it is advisable to broaden the field of vision and guide the mind, will and sentiment towards various forms of creativity which give rise to affection and to the wish to establish intimate forms of unity.

EXERCISING CREATIVITY REQUIRES IMAGINATION

One who surrenders to forms of union which establish a creative, development activity will create with the person loved a field of play or of encounter which is incredibly fertile. This fertility will finally give sexual activity in matrimony a moving strength of expression and an unsuspected capacity for increasing personal love. The sacrifice of the wait will have given you the capacity to accord each aspect of marital life its due value, which is the guarantee of fulfillment and deep contentment. Nothing has been repressed or left aside; on the contrary, everything is exceedingly enriched when integrated in the great task of building together a happy and fertile life of love.

If a person wishes to live intensely, one’s love relationship must be taken seriously. Its value must not be lowered but given expressions in full scope. Love must not be confused with eroticism; love is far richer and, therefore, is possible only when one is sufficiently mature and capable of unconditionally choosing and surrendering. One’s life must not be so directed that sex relations are given their true meaning and contribute to increasing, not subduing, one’s inner freedom. Continence requires sacrifice, but this means not repression, but the ordering of values; it relinquishes a lower value to rise to a higher one. One’s life should be a real adventure lived with the illusion given by love; but it must not be illusive as results from surrender to eroticism.

Training for love is not to impose adult ideas on young people or vice versa, but to give due quality to personal relationships. This is clearly stated by André Séve in a book which is a strong statement of the need to love one another unconditionally:

Marcello Peretti stresses again and again that the art of loving well cannot be improvised, but requires long and conscientious preparation. Hence his interest in underlining the need for solid "training for love".

Paolo Liggeri, in his work, Guide to Marriage, underlines the need to achieve the maturity of a personal being in order to live love fully:

1. Cf. L’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); El extranjero (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971). A detailed interpretation of this work is found in my Estética de la creatividad, pp. 411-441.

2. This link between language and creativity opens a surprisingly illuminating horizon to ethical research. In this field of illumination it will be possible to carry out one of the most pressing tasks of the present moment: drawing up an Ethics of Language. I offer a grain of support in my Estética de la creatividad. pp. 291-357.

3. Cf. Praxis cristiana, II. (Madrid, 1981).

4. Cf. La sexualidad en la vida de los jóvenes (Santander: Sal Terrae, 1979), p. 206.

5. Op. cit., p. 212.

6. Op. cit., pp. 213-214.

7. Op.cit., p. 215.

8. Cf. L’energie spirituelle (Paris: PUF, 1944), p. 4.

9. Op. cit. (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1976), p. 114.

10. Cf. El hombre vive de amor (Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1987), pp. 59-60.

11. "La educación sexual como educación para el amor", in M. Peretti (ed), La educación sexual (Barcelona: Herder, 1975), pp. 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 197, 201.

12. Op. cit., in M. Peretti (ed.), La educación sexual, p. 247.