Love is not just deep emotion. It's funny how numerous engagements and weddings around me -- which involve most vibrant expressions of love's emotion -- make me realize this all the more. In such a sexually unreserved culture, it is hard for us to think about old times, where two strangers met, got married, and grew to love each other along life's hard way. Interestingly, most couples marry today because they "love each other" before the actual ceremony and marriage, but there is a higher rate of divorce. I guess we have (most unfortunately, I might add) defined love by that mere thrill of "being in love" for the last hundred years or so. Selfishness replaced selflessness; vows became formalities. It is a most unfortunate thing.
"[Christian marriage] is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be 'in love' with someone else. 'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it." - C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Thanks, this was most encouraging. ^_^
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