On Love, for a friend.
Giorgio Paolucci, the President of the Faculty of Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan discusses love and marriage in Traces.
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
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. . . .
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 . . .

















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