Presently there is a discussion of whether people need sex education or formation for love. The first is generally understood as clarifying the various forms in which the marital act can be performed and explaining the ways to avoid malfunctions and problems. Formation for love means placing sexual experiences within the frame of interpersonal relations, with their wealth of implications.

The human person is a dynamic being whose destiny is to grow continuously in order to attain more perfect states of realization. The study of any aspect of human life, as noted in previous chapters, should be open to the fact that one aspect refers to and is extended in others, where it achieves its true meaning. In greeting another, giving one’s hand has some, though not full meaning. It intermingles my personality with yours, a process of initial communication and weaving a web of interrelation. But to stop at the mere handshake, with all that supposes of physical-sensitivity, physiology and psychology, would mean stopping half way, and constitute an abnormality in human behavior.

Something analogous happens when one is fascinated by the practice of sex and disregards everything this aspect does or should imply.

THE FOUR ELEMENTS OR ASPECTS OF MARITAL LOVE

Modern research emphasizes that the inner dynamism of the interpersonal love relationship brings into play four aspects already mentioned in another chapter which should now be analyzed in detail: sexuality, friendship, development of love in the home, and relevance.

If we analyze these in depth down to their final implications, we realize that in marital love these aspects strengthen and complement each other.

Phenomenological research has taught us throughout the XXth century to see the body as the place where a person expresses oneself, as a bearer of presence and encounter. Eminent contemporary thinkers – Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, Levinas and others – stress that one does not simply have a body, but is corporeal, that one lives personally in the expressive medium of one’s body. The whole person vibrates within the body, as all of a symphony vibrates with one accord, though not the whole symphony.

The sexual relationship is physical: two bodies are immediately joined and feelings are exchanged. If I see my body as an object that I have or own, logically I may believe that I am allowed to do what I like with it to gain satisfaction. Seen thus as a means to attain certain advantages, the body expresses the person not as a creative being, but as an egoistical I who, like a child, wants everything for oneself. Thus diminished the relation between two bodies is not an encounter: it does not lead to a creative, ecstatic experience, which is a source of happiness, enthusiasm, festive joy, support, peace, contentment and fulfillment.

The sex relationship lived by itself, as a mere source of gratification, fuses with one’s partner, thus destroying the play of creativity. It reduces the loved one to a bundle of stimulations to which one’s response is automatic, not free or creative. Hence the feeling of drowning produced by surrendering to tactile immediacy, which is inebriating and, as such, alienating.

One who is drunk with sensations is degraded by being deprived of any creative function. Purely lascivious attraction has a special power to drag one along, to rob one of inner freedom, to hypnotize and deliver one up to the pleasure of letting oneself fall. But it lacks any capacity to produce the genuine personal pleasure of being on the path to personal fulfillment.

The link between this incapacity and that power explains why erotic love, selfishly separating sexuality from its natural context, offers a paradise of pleasurable sensations while, at the same time, engendering sharp forms of violence. Pleasure seems to signify a peak experience, whereas violence ends in destruction. This enigmatic link between eroticism and destruction, eros and thanatos can be explained given the fact that eroticism means a process of vertigo which by successive phases leads to a destruction of personality and, at times, of biological life itself.

In the film by Truffaut: Jim et Jules, two young men share a young woman intimately, even after she marries one of them. This life given over to instinctual impulses appears to run quite smoothly alongside the river and its old mill. But one day one of the young men exclaims: "We have played with the sources of life and we have lost". This severe warning is an admonition of the tragedy to come. The young woman, with no previous violence, invites the friend for a drive in her car and urges her husband to keep his eyes wide open. She takes the wheel, starts up and, on crossing the bridge, to the mill takes a sharp turn which throws the car into the river. The film ends with the pathetic picture of the husband following the worker at the crematorium who is carrying two small urns of ashes.

Eroticism and destruction go together. Centuries ago the author of Celestine captured this in some unforgettable images. In recent times several writers, including Herbert Marcuse, proclaimed the need to give young people absolute freedom to practice sex in order to avoid repression and achieve the necessary equilibrium to their lives. Experiments in some schools, after a preliminary period of peace and calm, encountered insurmountable difficulties. The basic reason was that the practice of sex by itself makes humans violent while leaving them only half-developed.

There is a similarity to a plane which misses takeoff. It goes along the runway at a very high speed and normally would lift off, avoiding ground obstacles. To suddenly brake such powerful dynamism instead is to expose oneself to a violent headlong crash at the end of the runway. Similarly, to start the love process is to enter an area which releases great energy, mobilizes many personal resources and puts them under tension. There is no danger here when there is no blocking its natural tendency to develop freely. But it is extremely dangerous to reduce all the illusion of the one surrendering to love to a mere search for sensations for this turns into destructive violence. Where fertile illusion opens to broad horizons which nourish human life, enclosed within itself illusion becomes mere destructive frenzy.

But can the charm and value of first love be reduced to a source of satisfaction? Imagine hearing the wonderful Passion according to Saint Matthew by Bach. It moves one from the first chord struck by the orchestra and leaves one immersed in a sea of admiration when one hears the final chorus. How far that feeling stretches; it is immensely satisfying and cannot be reduced to producing pleasure. Emotions are very varied; the highest forms carry us to the highest realities. When Bach created his work he did not try to give us a moment of pleasure; his aim was much more, namely, to open us to the very deepest mystery. He does this with incomparable beauty, which does not remain enclosed in itself and in the pleasure it produces.

With one who is loved one feels transported and does not stop at the pleasure this feeling brings. Everything in human life is a sign of something superior. The reality to which one’s emotions relate is the personal friendship lived in marriage. Here we come to the second element of marital love.

The sexual relationship responds to an instinctual impulse according to a rule dictated by Nature, it is inflamed suddenly and quenched almost immediately. It lasts but a very short time. The flame is as intense as it is fleeting, and leaves barely any trace. It creates nothing because it does not ask that the creative faculty be put into play; it is sufficient to go along with the instinct.

Friendship is a generous relationship which one must create energetically. No instinct, left to itself, establishes the type of union implied by friendship. One is not born with this union, but must establish it oneself. Such establishment is both possible and difficult. It is possible because man is open to other realities and develops by creating spheres of interchange with them. It is difficult because it implies an express wish to open up to another, of mutual giving, comprehension, personal comradeship, presence and encounter. This wish inspires an act of confidence, availability, admiration and respect, recognition and commitment, creative consent and fidelity. In contrast stand the tendency towards selfishness, occlusion within ourselves, arrogance and self-sufficiency.

In order to open up to the other person sincerely and mingle one’s own personal ambit with theirs, we must rid ourselves of our masks, just as to graft two plants the bark must first be removed. This sincere opening up means offering oneself as one is, with no protective shields. It, therefore, supposes trust in the other, i.e. hope that the other will be true and faithful to us. The person who surrenders becomes vulnerable because exposed to betrayal by the person in whom one has confided, since anyone may accept our confidence in order to gain control.

The only way to trusting in someone is to look at the possibility of friendly encounter rather than at the risk of betrayal, and to decide to be available. I am available to you if I am always ready to listen and respond to you, to receive the possibilities you offer and offer you the possibilities I have. To be available I must consider myself as a being who is not being drained by giving myself, who realizes myself by running the risk of surrendering. One becomes available when one lives in the conviction that one’s greatest possession is to be able to give oneself to the difficult task of co-existence, with all the dangers involved.

The available person prefers fulfillment to security, and trusts in the power of fulfillment and maturity entailed by sincere friendship. He or she does not calculate the risks, but gives a full vote of confidence to the inner impulse which leads to unselfish surrender. There is something inside one which inspires to give oneself confidently; one believes in the fruitfulness of that voice, that special angel which speaks to him as to Socrates. Socrates said that an inner voice sometimes spoke to him, advised him, reprehended him, asked him whether death was not preferable to life lived without searching for the truth? That voice within us warns that we should not stop at mere sensations, but should search for the truth in genuine values which are not those closest to hand, but the highest.

One is unavailable when filled with anxiety, fearful of losing all one possesses. This provokes a closing of the spirit within oneself and withdrawal in search of security. Such a search is illusive, because solitary retreat separates man from that which makes him live in a truly personal manner. The one who is unavailable loses; one wins when one develops, through the creation of every type of ambit, particularly ambits of co-existence. Creative activity always demands a bond with valuable realities.

This bonding is possible only when there is sufficient humility to admire and recognize what is valuable. Admiration frees one from submission to the interests of the ego and its risks. The person who admires and recognizes something of value concentrates his or her energies in giving a positive answer. This answer constitutes, in turn, an appeal requiring a response. This interplay of appeal and response creates a field of encounter in which reasons emerge which lead to changing the initial reception of a valuable reality into full acceptance.

Such free, committed, active and collaborative acceptance establishes a creative field of play. In laymen’s language this is called a "friendly relationship". In this field "inside-outside" and "mine-yours" schemas are overcome, and replaced by a wonderful exchange between beings. You are still different from me, but no longer distant, exterior or strange. You can physically separate yourself from me to astronomical distances; but no matter: I call you, explain my problem, and immediately you immerse yourself in my life which you understand and respond to.

By encountering each other, we perfect our respective beings because the human person is precisely, as seen above, a being of encounter. By being friendly we strengthen our personality and mark more strongly our personal profiles; yet while these profiles stand out our communication becomes more fluid and effective, because our personal frontiers cease to be dividing barriers and become places of living interrelationship.

On this plane of creativity everything happens differently from the plane of possession. If I own a property adjacent to yours and wish to extend it this must be at your cost; any attempt to do so will come up against your opposition, for my extension means your contraction. The personal creative plane is quite the opposite. We are side by side and intermingle our spheres of life. This enriches us both so that I can be grateful that someone of value is by my side and approaches me, not to reduce, but to extend the horizons of my life. This gratitude severs the roots of the arrogant propensity to resent anything of value. When one is grateful for the existence of others, one inserts one’s love into the community. This brings us to the third aspect or element of love: the plan for a home life.

If personal, love is already communitary because the person comes from encounter and is destined thereto. Love is sparked within the intimacy of each person in the intimate half-light of a private relationship, and ends by wanting to communicate and collaborate in forming webs of co-existence. Since the days of Eden trees have been silent witnesses to thousands of lovers. Love is an asset which he who possesses wishes to spread. When this is an impossible love, the lovers feel that having to hide it is a punishment. This innate desire to communicate something secret responds to the communitary tension contained by all.

The love relationship houses a germ of fertility: it tends to create a bond between lovers, between these and the community, and between the community and all surrounding valuable realities. When we discover the love relationship we are in the presence of unsuspected fertile energy. This explains why so many people when making a serious commitment to love become responsible, learn to respond to the call of value, and take charge of the fruit of such response.

When we embark upon a love relationship we enter the dynamics of the creation of spheres of interchange, which tend to overlap. Therefore, when we love someone deeply we create relationships not only with them, but with their family, environment, ethical beliefs, religious ideals, culture, symbols and rites, and celebrations – all the latticework of spheres which constitute their life. Loving a person is loving them as a whole sphere of life, with everything that it involves.

But the fruitfulness of love is not limited to establishing relationships with already existing realities. It gives birth to new personal realities, unrepeatable and unchangeable. We are able to look upon this incredible power without astonishment only because we have seen it since childhood.

Marital love is creative in two ways: it increases personal friendship and brings forth new lives. Whenever there is creativeness one touches bottom in the mystery of being for we seem to approach the enigma of origins, that surprising point at which something that did not exist begins to exist. The creation of new human lives has amazing attributes: a life appears before us endowed with its own vocation and mission, a being with a capacity to think, feel and love, to make plans, to travel throughout the whole universe, discover its origin and raise itself up to God and love Him. To begin to glimpse the wealth encompassed within human life reveals the importance of marital love; it gives the impression of perceiving a mystery, an abyss of magnificence which evokes immense respect. Whatever be our moral or religious attitude, the mere consideration of what marital love implies makes us treat it with profound reverence.

This respect, filled with admiration, appears in a decision as simple as it is decisive: to take human marital love in all its scope and to give due importance to all its aspects - sexual and friendship, sensitive and spiritual, satisfying and sacrificing, instinctive and creative. To link these aspects a certain maturity is required, namely, the capacity to extend freedom to each content in order to relate them with others, enrich and complement them. This need to relate concepts with each other is found in the relational condition of being human. Nothing in the human person can be taken singly; each component takes on real meaning when it enters into play with the rest.

We have just described four elements in marital love: sexuality, friendship, tendency to create a home life, and relevance. These four elements should not simply be juxtaposed as objects usually are. They must be assembled to form a structure as a constellation of complementary elements. If one is broken off from the others the whole collapses. This enables us to understand eroticism, namely, a breaking away of sexuality, the first of the four elements in marital love, in order to obtain passing satisfactions. This break off is wrong and as such violent and a source of violence. It creates violence because the human person is born to associate with other beings and must put all his faculties in the service of the ideal of personal union.

THE HUMAN TENDENCY TO ESTABLISH FRUITFUL RELATIONSHIPS

The human being is born already sexed as masculine or feminine and therefore is predisposed to create bonds with someone who is complementary in many aspects and willing to establish a fruitful sphere of interchange. Each person carries relationship with others in his or her own being. Attraction to the other sex is not a fancy or a whim. It is a movement born in one in contact with another. To a certain point, it is subject to my control and decision, but it does not depend on my will, but is already determined by my configuration. By existing I am immersed in an extremely powerful dynamism which leads me to break my family ties and to join with another being. The purpose of this biological, psychological and spiritual energy is not merely to satisfy a basic individual need like eating and sleeping.

If it were, that would lower the meaning of such primary strength. Nourishment and rest are necessary to conserve biological life, but play no part in developing the human personality because they hold no creativity. On the other hand, sexual activity relates two personal beings and subjects them to special emotions. What meaning does this emotive bond have? Without doubt, it is the creation of a sphere of relationship, "together", a field of encounter.

Seen in depth, the sexual force is generous, it attempts to overwhelm the individual and to form the person as a communitary being. The person who marries to be happy alone reveals serious immaturity, for maturity comes from links with others.

If it is to be an authentic human act every sexual expression should indicate a desire for personal union. This is not reduced to linking two individuals, but establishes a sphere of community. Sexual potency has a communitary function. A man and a woman may love each other intensely, but if they are not going to form a home life, they should not put their sex drive at stake.

The home life, like every form of life, carries the need to perdure, and therefore must be renewed. The personal condition of sexual relations demands that these relations be fruitful, not just as regards motivating personal love, but also with respect to the procreation of new lives.

This opening to fecundity means guiding sexual forces towards value, goodness and fulfillment of meaning, which orientation generates unimaginable power, capable of integrating the various levels of the process of love. When this integration is absent, sexual energy is only ruled by certain automatic procedures which leave impersonal the experience of love, making it mechanical, utilitarian, and in the same measure degrading.

There is nothing that disillusions a sensitive person so much as the suspicion that an act of intimacy is not a response to wholly personal motivations. If the sex act, as committing and giving oneself, is reduced to a type of passionate vertigo, it loses its quality and becomes grotesque. Reducing the phenomenon of love to automatic bodily functions is purely debasing.

This debasement is found at the root of every kind of prostitution. To prostitute is to reduce to a means to attain certain interests an act which should be a means by which a personality unfolds. Sexual acts are the means by which personal love should be actively declared. Such declaration is gratifying, but its goal is neither first nor foremost to produce gratification, but to give an ardent testimony of love, which means surrendering to the loved one and rising above the state of mere passion. Mere pleasure is not a value sufficient to give full meaning to an intimate act which touches the most sensitive strings of a person. In the scale of values it is a very elementary value. If the wish for personal surrender and creativity in the heart of home life is lacking, the amorous sex act, however pleasurable it may be, is always false, for it is blocked and has no full meaning.

This explains how uncontrolled desire can sweep along genuine love as in a flood. Desiring and wanting must be distinguished, for often we desire something we do not really want, which reflects a lack of true inner freedom. We become free as we grow in the power to integrate wishes in a task endowed with meaning. By the same token this integration overcomes the repression of desires and their anarchical satisfaction.

Nowadays we tend to give full rein to desires, as if they were the model for value. Any compromise in the satisfaction of desires is understood tendentiously to be a form of repression which provokes neurosis and hardness of character. It is dangerous for one’s psychic balance to wish to quash with violence and repression the voice of desire which, Spinoza warned, is found at the root of the human being as a dynamic being with impulses and inclinations. But it also would be reckless suicide to ignore the destructive capacity of desires when they are not assembled in a meaningful structure.

To develop properly one must know at first hand what desires imply: their propensity to be led by various forms of vertigo, their vulnerability to advertising, and yet their ability to be wholly meaningful and effective when subjected to the guidance of ideals. The throbbing tension nurtured by desire is not in conflict with calm reflection, understood as the capacity to channel vital energy towards goals with full value and meaning.

Ethical life should try not to repress desires but to direct them, to integrate them in spheres of action which respond to the true being and deepest vocation of the person. Such integration does not eliminate desires but assimilates them in a project of value; it integrates them in a process of creativity illumined by an ideal.

This integration gives desires, tendencies and instincts a new value. They are not enclosed within themselves, but open to a task which surpasses the mere search for gratification. In this opening to the highest values they achieve their full meaning.

THE PATH OF VALUES PROVIDES STRENGTH AND EQUILIBRIUM

When directed towards the heights, the various human energies reach their highest power and, at the same time, gain equilibrium. But it is not enough stoically to control instinctive tendencies. The highest values, all the realities which are the source of meaning for our existence must be fervently desired. More than controlling desires and appetites, we should speak of their strict ordering and integration into effective fields of action for human development.

Tendencies or instinctive drives are not bad. What is bad is to separate them from the spirit and detach them from the values which give them their full scope and meaning.

One who has begun a love relationship feels its emotion and enchantment. There is the impression of having discovered a marvelous land, hitherto unknown and unsuspected. But this should not be rushed.To create genuine friendship and a shared existence full of the highest value one must look towards the greatness of the goal which will guide one’s powers, both instinctive and spiritual, in a convergent direction. This convergence will give life its full personal identity. There will be peace within oneself, because all the attitudes and actions will be adapted to one’s most intimate vocation. It is this adaptation which signifies genuineness and dignity.

The foregoing clarifies a decisive idea: we should not repress tendencies, but direct them. Only by putting them into play in order to achieve something valuable will tendencies cease to convert themselves into passions as inclinations which pull one down. One who wishes to keep his personal dignity, must never let oneself be pulled down or seduced; it must be he or she who guides all his faculties and energies towards high goals. It is these goals which give inclinations their full meaning and force, which they do not repress but channel. The orchestra conductor does not suppress any instrumentalist, but indicates the path he must follow to carry out his function perfectly. Sometimes he must be silent, at others he must join with other instruments; occasionally he must take the lead, but always he must affirm his personality whilst performing in a cooperative manner.

Being cooperative is equivalent in every creative process to being productive. Encouraging individualistic isolation lessens one’s creative capacity. Teaching that each one may do what he likes with his body and inner processes is to encase one in oneself and render impossible any creative work. It might appear generous if you are provoked into behaving in a manner totally alien to the norm, course and rule.

Look for satisfaction, behave with absolute freedom, do not be muffled by foolish ancient taboos. Take on, for once, the privilege of being free. The sexuality of an animal is programmed for the fastidious task of procreation. You have the capacity to break away from that. Do not be burried under by a tangle of obligations. Be free.

 

This statement in favor of liberty is as easy as it is dangerous. To follow these instructions is to become subject to the worst of servitudes: the total lack of creativity. This is to see all exits blocked towards developing properly as a person and to experience anguish and desperation. To avoid this state of spiritual asphyxiation one has to know well what makes us humans and leads to real happiness. This knowledge is acquired during a process of training for love which gives us sufficient inner freedom to know how to grade values and give priority to the highest. This will be the subject of the next chapter.

Some decades ago the opinion was spread that only free love, unconditioned by personal commitment, allows one to live in peace and harmony. Slowly it was discovered that this return to the theory of the good savage, according to which if one gives in to one’s basic tendencies they develop naturally with no problems, does not correspond to reality. Close investigation of the thoughts of such writers as Herbert Marcuse shows that they do not defend the cult of uprooted love in so simplistic a way as had been supposed and as pictured above. His real intention, it is now believed, was not to call for freer and more frequent sexual activity, reduced to its erotic dimension, but, on the contrary, to show that eroticism is a tawdry and superficial lowering of the real development of fully human sexuality. This latter should be understood as the ability for the whole person to relate to others in an open, serene, joyful and constructive way.

J.M. Pohier is conclusive in this respect:

Ambrosio Valsechi confirms this opinion of Pohier:

1. Cf. Der Mensch vor der Frage nach dem Sinn (Munich, Piper, 1985), p. 93.

2. The true relation of presence is the result of coordinating a form of immediacy with another of distance. Different forms of immediacy and distance give place to different forms of presence. The study of the relationship between immediacy, distance and presence throws a beam of understanding upon a good number of human events. A full study of this evocative subject can be found in my book, El triángulo hermenéutico (Madrid: PPC, 1975).

3. Cf. Sobre el amor humano (Madrid: Rialp, 1961), pp. 75-76.

4. Cf. ¿Es unidimensional el cristianismo?, Concilium, 65 (1971), 187-199.

5. Cf. Nuevos caminos de sexualidad (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1974), pp. 58-61.