a few days before valentine's day, i thought on posting something from my h4 cle lessons about love, particularly those taken from m. scott peck's book "the road less travelled."
Looking back: Myths of Love
Each myth always involves the movement of the ego boundaries. It’s apparent that in many of these myths of love, the ego boundaries have been restricted or is sacrificed to the point that a person no longer grow. In such cases, since love is unable to achieve its goal (spiritual growth of self and others), these experiences are thus myths or in the words of Pope Benedict, “a caricature or an impoverished form of love.”
Love as decision and commitment
True love, according to M. Scott Peck, goes through three stages. The first of which is "falling in love", or infatuation. Here, love presents itself as a feeling, an emotion that we seek and enjoy. It brings pleasure, excitement, and ecstasy, but sooner or later, it will have to die down like other emotions. Love begins in physical attraction, but it takes more than that to be truly and really love.
As reality begins to set in to the picture, realities about love, the partner, and the decision come into the fore. This is the second stage known as "falling out of love" or disillusion. Here, love ceases to feel good, things to back to its normal and ordinary ways, and the love once found seems to be lost with the reality of the "other-ness" of the partner.
Some people stop on the first stage, others last until the second stage until partners find themselves torn apart by love itself. But the challenge is to bridge these stages and make a concrete decision to love.
The third stage of love is "choosing to love" or decision. Going beyond the feelings and imperfections, partners get to care and accept each other: to love each other in richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better of for worse. In the context of marriage, this love finds fulfillment as it builds a partnership of whole life: a total sharing that involves physical (love as bodily, as "two become one" in love), spiritual (commitment of spouses, with God at the center of their lives), material (sharing in building up the family and raising children), and psychological (union of mind, heart, soul) realities.
Love is therefore the capacity to share and care for the other. This decision to love brings forth a commitment to love oneself authentically ("to love your enemies") and perfectly ("to love the another as God has loved me").
tomorrow: final reflections on love
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