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Man and Woman. If It’s Not Forever, It’s Not True
The President of the Faculty of Psychology at the Catholic University points out the punctuality of judgment on marriage, “the sacramental act that most values the human,” in an age that exalts the “magic” of instinctive and short-lived affective experiences

edited by Giorgio Paolucci

In praise of marriage. A praise that is unpopular in these times marked by the frailty of relationships, and in which free cohabitation is on the increase, quick divorce is being discussed, and recognition of homosexual unions is being called for. The fact that there are people, like Fr Giussani, who define marriage as the “greatest sign of the identification between humanity and Christian faith” seems to be a provocation. It is a body-blow for the high-minded, but also for many “good Catholics” who are sprawled on the couches of their good habits and do little to disturb an existence made of mediocrity. As we discuss the letter to the Holy Father from Fr Giussani with Eugenia Scabini, lecturer in social psychology of the family and President of the Faculty of Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, we realize that Giussani’s brief but intense re-reading of John Paul II’s magisterium plumbs the depths of human experience.

What do we learn from the experience of marriage?
Long-lasting love between a man and a woman is the human experience par excellence, the most eloquent sign that man realizes himself fully through a bond with an other, that the “I” is constitutively open to the encounter with a “you,” and that the “I” expresses itself in a relationship. Today, the term “self-realization” is fashionable. Well, marriage reminds us that man is not self-made, but realizes his identity within a privileged relationship, a loving bond with an other completely different from himself (another being) and yet similar to himself. This bond is not a private fact between two people. All cultures have given public recognition of the love between man and woman: the presence of witnesses at the marriage ceremony stresses that there is a third party that recognizes this bond. Hence, the union between man and women in a generative prospect is essential for the survival of society.

Why has the Church raised marriage to the dignity of a sacrament?
The sacrament of Matrimony seals the human experience of love, giving it solidity and a prospect of wholeness, faithfulness and stability it would not have of itself. Nature, as it were, becomes holy; a natural bond becomes sacred. In this sacralization, the couple finds the capacity to overcome the frailty that belongs to human nature and to continue its course. This is why Giussani defines marriage as “that sacramental act that most values the human.”

In the experience of the couple, the differences are lived as a source of mutual attraction and complementarity, but also as an objection to the realization of a true unity. The difference ends up being a scandal, to the point of asking how it is possible for the unity to last.
Marriage is often put up to be a magic harmony, whereas really it is an evidently dramatic enterprise, in which the differences are a natural and unavoidable fact. There is no point in trying to smooth them over, as if we would like to anaesthetize reality and, in the end, deny it. True love requires that the indelible otherness of the partner not be hidden or flattened out, but accepted and embraced. Giussani explains this in his book, The Miracle of Hospitality: “If a man accepts a woman–paradoxically sharpening his awareness of her otherness–and embraces her in this awareness, he will never accept her so completely.” Keeping together a man and a woman (we could call it originary diversity), binding them in a deep and long-lasting relationship, is the challenge. As Levy Strauss said, in an anthropological perspective, “Marriage is making what is strange familiar.”

The point of departure for a couple’s relationship is usually the experience of falling in love. How is it possible for “falling in love” to become a stable and lasting love, especially in a context like the present one, in which the ephemeral and the provisional are the predominant norms of behavior?
Falling in love starts off from a natural attraction to the other which pushes you to meet him. Deep down, there is a “presumption of similarity.” In other words, you tend to ascribe to the other a strong likeness to yourself, and so you think understanding each other will be easy. This has a strong emotive effect, but a good dose of illusion, too, and experience makes you think again. The other turns out not always able to meet your primitive and often unrealistic expectations. We can say that if it passes this test, then “falling in love” changes into true love. There is a transition from idealization to the ideal, the latter being a presence that moves you to travel the paths of the relationship, even the tough ones. Love is an exacting work; understanding has to be built up day by day, and the conjugal relationship has to be continually nourished or it will wither. One has to pass on from the exalting experience of falling in love to taking up responsibility and building love together. The transition from the stage of falling in love to that of true love is crucial, and marriages often do not survive this “leap.” We can say, by way of provocation, that today you have to marry over and over again, but with the same person. In other words, you have constantly to renew that pact which has to be nourished and sustained in time through a work that touches profoundly the freedom of those who have made the pact of fidelity in joy and in suffering. The crucial step that the couple is called to take is from “I marry this (aspect) of you” to “I marry you.”
The alternative that “modernity” proposes is rather to marry again with different people, the illusory road of seeking in other affective experiences the answer to the desire for fulfillment that everyone carries in his heart. There is a mentality that justifies changing partners because of the obstacles that come up in a relationship. Difficulties are lived as an obstacle to the relationship itself, which–who knows why–should enjoy a kind of “pre-ordained harmony,” immune to the difficulties of life. Let’s look at it from the other direction and ask ourselves: why is the emphasis on the relationship of the couple not matched by a similarly strong invitation to see that it is nourished? People, rightly, take care of their children, but why don’t they take the same care of the marriage bond, and of its education? Psychic generation, too, blossoms from a love that comes first. A child is the fruit of conjugal love, not a substitute for it.

Giussani compares the Pope’s view of love–which he defines as “conscious of that approximation to the ideal that is there in every human moment”–to that of Dante, who is aware that “during his earthly life, man has a piece of him” in expectation of fulfillment. It’s a dizzying position, a difficult one to keep….
In his letter, the verses of Vita Nova which accompany the description of this position are moving: “A gentle spirit, full of love, keeps telling the soul: Sigh.” In quoting Dante, Giussani evokes the profoundly human dynamic of desire, which is something different from the immediate satisfaction of our needs, or at least urges us to go beyond them. In the bond between man and woman, desire “deflates” the pretension that the other be the total answer to one’s longing for happiness, and at the same time it nourishes the entreaty for the infinite, for the “forever” that is the deep soul of the relationship.
In love, you experience something greater, a mystery which transcends the two of you and which is expressed with a sigh, certainly not a sigh of resignation, but a sigh that expresses a longing. If there is no sigh, there is inevitable decline into pretension as regards the other, and into rage at your own and the other’s inadequacy. Two people who live the experience of true love “sigh,” because they look toward the infinite through each other. Holding hands, they walk together towards the fulfillment of them both. They experience that love for the other coincides with love for the other’s destiny. They have a common destiny and they are fruit of a love that preceded them.