January 8, 2008
TOPIC:
THE NON-EXISTENT PRINCE CHARMING
Dear Subscriber:
When I was very young, like many my age I thought that liking and loving were the same thing, with the latter being an intense variant of the former. It was only as I grew that I learned that liking and loving, while similar and often coincident, are different.
The chief difference is in the will. Whether you like someone is pretty much outside your control. The person's appearance, attitude, or affectations may or may not appeal to you.
If a man is quiet, you may find that trait appealing and call him reserved; you may find it unappealing and call him a bore. One girl may be, in your lights, either slender or anorexic; another, either Goyaesque or just plain fat. You might think an acquaintance is a wonderful conversationalist--or perhaps someone who can't keep his mouth shut.
Nowhere in the New Testament is our Lord recorded as having told us to "like one another." Instead, he instructed us to "love one another" (John 13:34, 35; John 15:12, 17). In these verses he put this not as a recommendation, not as a suggestion, not as a not-so-subtle hint, but as an outright command: "I have a new commandment for you" (John 13:34); "this is my commandment" (John 15:17).
Liking is something that "just happens." Loving is something we have control over. Liking is a spontaneous emotional reaction. Loving is an act of the will. You never will like everyone, but you can love anyone. We demonstrate the first part of this truth to ourselves every day.
Walk down a crowded street during the noontime bustle. You'll see people you take an instant dislike to. Be stuck in a traffic jam, and you'll find more. Read the morning paper, and you'll find still others. Your everyday experience tells you that, no matter how open-minded and positive you might like to be, the people whom you find unlikeable are legion.
What seems incongruous is that "you can love anyone." I am not saying that you will, because in all probability you won't. But it is theoretically possible in a way that liking everyone is not.
Many years ago, when I first practiced law, I one day was appointed to represent a rapist at a hearing. He was perhaps the only person I ever have met who seemed to have an entirely dormant conscience. I found not the least thing likeable in him, and I knew that, unless he changed dramatically and unexpectedly, I never could like him. But I also knew that I could love him, because love is an act of the will.
Loving is not an act we carry out very successfully. I don't remember feeling any love toward that rapist--pity, perhaps, but not love. Yet I must have realized that I could have loved him, had I willed it. A saint would have willed it, but not even a saint could have willed himself into liking him, absent the rapist reforming and becoming likeable.
In summary, then, when it comes to basically good people whom we meet, it is possible for us to love any of them. This even applies to prospective spouses, and here I come to the real point I wish to make.
As you know, Catholic Answers hosts chastity talks by various speakers. Such talks are aimed at young audiences--high school and college students, chiefly--and, by necessity, the speakers themselves are young. At least they are still years away from middle age.
Some speakers who have spoken for us, when first starting out, told their young audiences that somewhere out there was a Prince or Princess Charming, someone fated from all eternity to be a young person's perfect match. Listeners were told something like this: "Save yourself for that one person that God has set aside just for you."
When I learned that this is what was being said, I told our speakers to cut it out--because it wasn't true. It sounded romantic, and it sounded pious, but it wasn't true. It left each young listener thinking that there was one and only one person whom he could love and have a happy marriage with and that, if he waited long enough, God would arrange for the couple to meet.
That's not how real life works. When I have a chance to speak to young people, I shock them by saying, "Within easy driving distance, there are a hundred people whom you could marry and have an equally happy life with." Of course, there also are a hundred or a thousand with whom they might be miserable.
My point was that a marriage is what you make of it, under grace. In the old, old days, marriages often were arranged--and often turned out very well, no worse than the average marriage entered into by people who imagined they were marrying a Prince or Princess Charming.
This does not, of course, mean that every match is a good one or that every match is wisely entered into. (I am reminded of Dr. Johnson's remark, when told that a man who had been very unhappy in marriage had remarried immediately after his wife had died: "It was the triumph of hope over experience.") But it does mean that fairy tales should be left to children.
It does no harm for a ten-year-old girl to dream of a Prince Charming, but half her life will be wasted if she still thinks, at thirty-five, that she should wait for the appearance of a Prince Charming whom God has reserved for her and that she should let pass other prospects with whom, in fact, she could be sufficiently happy.
Until next time,
Karl
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The content of this E-Letter is copyright 2008 by Karl Keating.
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