A yes at all risks, a young married couple's adventure"Don't worry, the youth is a disease that is cured with age", a veteran lawyer once told me when I was at the beginning of my professional career. Now, with age (some age), I think I can also say the opposite: "age is a disease that is cured with youth". Indeed, a heart in love always tries to stay young. There are young hearts that inhabit old bodies, and old hearts that inhabit young bodies.
One of the current paradoxes is that, although life has lengthened, existential crises have advanced in time. The acceleration of the vital rhythm derived from the craving to devour experiences of all kinds as soon as possible has precipitated marital crises. The important thing seems to be the accumulation and documentation of one experience after another (through the timely and ubiquitous "selfie", of course). Such is the impulse to capture all the moments that we sometimes forget to live and experience them with the calm that some of them demand.
Premature crises
In the marital relationship, we are exposed to the same threat. The crises that used to come at ten years old are now knocking at the door at the age of two. It is not uncommon to find recent marriages that fail because of boredom: "And now that we have tried everything, what are we going to do?" If we add to this the easy and exhaustive access to all kinds of knowledge provided by the Internet, in a few years, without realizing it, we may have transformed our marriage into an old relationship in which everything is already known beforehand.
With age (which today we could replace by the accumulation of experiences), life acquires, in the words of Romano Guardini ("The Stages of Life"), the character of the "already known", since we know the beginning and the end of a good part of the events, how people behave, how projects develop, etc., and we lose (or can lose) an essential element of happiness: the capacity to admire, Who has not met one of those resigned and prematurely aged people who cannot be surprised by anything new because they know everything in advance?
Boredom has always been considered a classic symptom of the mid-life crisis (today advanced, as I say), which can lead to hopelessness or, even worse, despair (Julián Marías, in "El cansancio de la vida" has explained well the difference between one and the other: there is hopelessness when nothing is expected from the future; there is despair when nothing is expected from the present). Without hope, happiness is not possible. And at the basis of hope is the capacity for admiration. Whoever is not capable of admiring life and its thousand marvelous vicissitudes cannot be happy because he is incapable of hoping, recognizing and discovering the new when it appears hidden in the ordinary and known.
José Antonio Marina warned of this danger: "I tell my students that things do not bore us because they are boring, but because we are boring they bore us. And the fact is that in the face of a passive gaze, things repeat themselves, even if they are new and marvelous. For this reason, what ultimately characterizes creative intelligence is the freedom to decide in each case the meaning we want things to have" (Interview in Aceprensa, December 25, 1996).
Beauty is biographical
Our marriage cannot be part of the "already known", it is not an event that can be captured in a "selfie" nor is it just another experience.
Some young people are surprised, and even uncomfortable, to see older couples showing strong expressions of tenderness and physical love. Some even think that certain compliments between them are the product of marital convention or mere habit and not of passion or infatuation. They still do not know that beauty is cumulative, biographical, and when the enamored eyes of that seventy-year-old husband who has lived forty-five years with his wife contemplate her, they do not see only the present moment, but her entire biographical life. His gaze is capable of adding to the serene beauty of maturity the freshness of youth, which he and only he is capable of recognizing in his wife because he and only he has made her flesh of his flesh and life of his life.
Human beauty never disappears, it remains and it is measured with the successive discoveries that love makes throughout life, so that the beauty, also the physical beauty, of the twenties is measured with that of the thirties and this with that of the forties, and so on and so forth.
Those who truly love are able to see in the loved one all the existential beauty they have accumulated, because what will illuminate their skin will not be the years of youth or cosmetics, but the feeling of being loved and desired through a look in love.
A few weeks ago, I received a whatsapp from a sister-in-law of mine in which she forwarded a message from her 81-year-old father, in which he explained that his wife was hospitalized for a heart attack (thank God, now out of danger) and he was going to go home to pick up some clothes and medical reports. And, in case any of his children should doubt this, he added: "afterwards I will return to the hospital to spend the night with her, as I have done for the last 51 years".
Access to privacy
Others look at our wife or husband from the outside and see in them perhaps a mere sum of traits, qualities or defects, but we do not. If we have given ourselves fully, we see the loved one as she sees herself, from the inside, from her unrepeatable intimacy.
But how can we achieve this freshness in our marriage? How can we always see our spouse with new eyes, with the admiration of an active gaze, open to the novelty of the unprecedented, waiting to discover and rediscover the one we already know so well and so well?
It does not depend on us alone. Each one of us can put in the attitude, the desire, but, in spite of wanting to, the result can be elusive. The only way to discover the most authentic part of the loved one, that which is unique, unrepeatable and exclusive, that which we will not find in anyone else is to access their intimacy, that is to say, the core of their person, the place where all their aspirations, desires, qualities and defects spring from.
But no one can access another person's intimacy if he or she does not decide to open it. Not even the best of psychologists can penetrate another person's intimacy without his or her cooperation and collaboration.
The secret to living a married life in constant renewal consists in going out of oneself and opening oneself fully to the other, without reserve and without fear of making oneself vulnerable. Time, mutual knowledge, the character of "what is already known" as Guardini pointed out, end up deceiving us. We think we already know it well and end up renouncing to go deeper into it.
Three premises
I think that at least three premises are necessary.
The first is the conviction that the person I chose one day, as she did with me, is the person that God has thought for me, counting on my freedom. That in her, if I look at her with the gaze we were talking about, I will find the values and qualities that will make me grow as a person, many of them different and even opposed to my own, perhaps to act as a counterbalance. How does one grow spiritually if not in the encounter with value, with a value higher than oneself?
I am reminded of the story of Beauty and the Beast, where a despicable, ungrateful, violent and merciless being, in the encounter with a higher value than him, Beauty, not only grows, but becomes again who he really was. How many times in our married life we have stopped being ourselves, we have become hardened and sour. The way to return to who we were and to grow as a person is to look at ourselves in the mirror of the values of our wife or husband.
The second is time, but time well spent, an undivided time in which we dedicate ourselves to each other, taking time away from the mundane noise, to open our hearts and revisit so many places in our marriage: household roles and chores, sports, personal time, leisure, culture and family activities; the extended family, work, family and personal finances and expenses; our inner life; our communication style, our listening and trust, our routines and habits; our likes and dislikes; what we give and expect; the rules we have explicitly or implicitly established; our sex life, its quality and frequency; our wounds, forgiveness and gratitude....
And the third is sincerity, combined with a certain naivety: it is better to ask again than to take it for granted; to ask again than to renounce obtaining it; to tell him again than to wait for him to ask for it. Marital infancy is a certain state of naivety of the spirit that keeps it always open to novelty.
Rediscovering sexuality
Also in the field of the sexual relationship, transformations occur that disorient the spouses and that, if they do not know each other and do not talk to each other calmly, can lead to dangerous flirtations or dreams of a sexual life outside marriage. The greater sexual desire of the male continues to be present in the psyche, but, at a certain age, as a consequence of the dilation of the period of excitation, he needs more attention and a more prolonged stimulation and preparation of the sexual act, which usually coincides with a period of greater inhibition of the woman, who, on the contrary, accentuates her tendency to a passive role in the sexual relationship. This divergence, if not redirected, generates perplexity and uneasiness.
It's time to redo our sex life. Get out of the routine and rethink it. To talk without obstacles, barriers or false modesty. We already know each other. It is about revitalizing an essential aspect of our marriage, thinking first of the other.
We already know that the male has a greater desire, that for him the frequency (minimum, weekly!) and fullness of sexual relations has an emotional meaning and transmits confidence and security in other areas of his life, and that he expects his wife to take the initiative as well.
We also know that women need more preparation time and more anticipation, sometimes hours, that they need to prepare their bodies and their affections, that for them sex begins in the heart and is nourished by details, understanding, tenderness and affection.
That said, once the two give their bodies to each other, both have to enjoy. As the curves of arousal are different, both have a commitment to mutual enjoyment: the man, to accompany his woman, with the appropriate caresses, if she wants to reach total arousal; the woman, to prepare her affections during the previous hours and also to help the man when he needs it.
On the basis of the most absolute respect (if one does not want to, there is nothing more to talk about), oriented towards the search for union and not selfish absorption of pleasure and provided that the full meaning of sexuality is respected (that is, the feminine nature is welcomed without altering it, but respecting the fertile and infertile periods), everything is possible and admissible in the sexual encounter within marriage.
Mutual arousal, caresses and kisses in the erogenous zones of the body and sensual postures are part of the humanization of the sexual act, do not present any moral objection and are advisable, provided they are lived with delicacy, are consented to and do not hurt the sensitivity of one of the spouses.
John Paul II explained it in his Theology of the Body: "It is not what enters the mouth that makes a man impure, but what comes out of the heart. Christ does not link purity in the moral sense with physiology and organic processes. None of the aspects of sexual uncleanness, in a strictly somatic, biophysiological sense, enters per se into the definition of purity or impurity in the moral (ethical) sense" (Catechesis 50, dated December 10, 1980).
A century earlier, Tolstoy had already put these words in the mouth of Pózdnyshev, the protagonist of his novel "Sonata a Kreutzer": "Because vice does not lie in the physical, because no physical barbarity is in itself depraved; vice, true depravity, lies in feeling liberated from all moral commitment to the woman with whom you establish physical contact. And it is precisely this lack of commitment that I considered meritorious".
To love "all the days of our life" we must give life to all the days of our love.
Secretary General, International Federation for Family Development (IFFD)
