Love is Love
But Sex is Sex - the Essential
Foundation of Authentic
Marriage
by Tyler Blanski
The love that dares
to join the Creator in creating
human beings, life, another life
If two people
love each other, they should be able
to get married, right? This is the
popular logic for so-called gay
marriage. "Love is love." What
if the slogan is gibberish? It is not
a definition or even a description of
love, and it certainly is not an
intelligible proposition or premise in
an argument. An apple is an apple, but
it does not follow that a McIntosh is
a crabapple is applesauce is apple
cider is apple pie. A wide variety of
loves dovetail in marriage, it's true,
but is there a "marital love"
distinguishable from other kinds of
love that, once experienced, entitles
lovers of any variety to marry?
More to the
point, "Love is love" is misleading in
the gay marriage debate because the
defining characteristic of both
marriage and homosexuality is not
actually love, but sex. We are
reminded of this fact when we remember
that a marriage is not a marriage
until it has been consummated, and
that a homosexual relationship is not
a homosexual relationship
unless it is in some way sexual. Now,
to observe that both marriage and
homosexual relationships are
distinctly sexual is not necessarily
to equate the two. And the fact
remains that many homosexual couples
love each other, and that love is an
integral part of marriage. But what
makes both marriage and homosexuality
recognizably different from other
kinds of relationships is not love but
sex; and, as we shall see, sex is what
makes homosexuality and marriage so
distinct from each other.
To say that I think marriage ought to
be a cold and stubborn contract void
of romance and affection, or that I
think infertile couples or couples
that choose not to procreate are not
really married, is an erroneous
characterization of my thesis. I am,
however, admittedly playing the role
of Mrs. Lynde, who voiced a practical
and cautionary word when she saw Anne
of Green Gables and Gilbert Blythe
walking together: "Anne is a young
woman and Gilbert's a man. . . . He's
a fine fellow, and Anne can't do
better. I hope she won't get any romantic
nonsense into her head." What I
am trying to argue is that although
marriage is a comprehensive union of
love, what makes it distinct and
different from other kinds of
companionship is not love, but
sexual-reproductive complementarity.
What I am trying to do is almost
impossible. I am trying to convince
you that the role we have given love
in marriage is not too weak, but too
strong. The most basic value of
autonomous marriage-for-love (as
opposed to arranged marriage, for
example) is that the best reason to
marry and stay married is love,
especially "romantic love," and our
appreciation of marriage has suffered
much for it. Elevated so highly above
marriage's other aspects as to obscure
them, love has greatly diminished the
meaning of marriage, and now is the
hour of our discontent. With gay
marriage, the most basic value of
marriage-for-love has reached its
zenith. It is the beginning of the
end. Gay marriage stretches
marriage-for-love to the breaking
point.
Bear with me. Very little is as
pedantic and cumbersome as the
explanation of what should be common
sense. It is much easier to spin a
yarn than to untangle its knots, and
"Love is love" is no exception.
Love Is
Love Is Homosexual?
Love is love. So why should a gay
couple's sexual orientation obstruct
them from marrying each other? That
depends. First, what exactly is the
relationship between love and sexual
preference?
Love is love, but is all love sexual?
A man can love another man, even find
him exciting and attractive, and not
want to have sex with him. A mother
can love her son, a brother can love
his sister, a pastor can love his
flock, and you can love your slippers,
even desire them on a cold night, but
nothing about these loves is sexual.
Anne of Green Gables and Diana Barry
held hands when they walked home from
school, sometimes slept in the same
bed, danced together, loved each other
deeply, were "bosom friends," and
nothing about it was sexual. Just
because two people of the same sex
love each other, it does not follow
that their relationship is homosexual.
A homosexual does not simply love
someone of his own sex, but loves him
in a sexual way. In fact, however
awkward it is to say it, for any given
relationship to be homosexual
it does not necessarily have to be
loving, but it must in some way be
sexual. A homosexual relationship is
by definition sexual in that
it is experienced in sexual attraction
or intimate bodily contact between
individuals. Is love, then, necessary
or even apposite to a discussion about
homosexuality and marriage?
Love is love, but is love the same
thing as attraction, even sexual
attraction? It should go without
saying that friends and siblings and
coworkers may be genuinely attracted
to one another without that attraction
being sexual. Being attracted to
someone – to a magnetic personality,
say, or a passionate public speaker –
is not necessarily to be sexually
attracted to him, much less to love
him. As any woman who has felt more
than she wanted to when she met the
eyes of a man not her husband can tell
you, attraction can be the very
opposite of love. But the homosexual
is not simply attracted to people of
his own sex; he is sexually
attracted. He may even be in love, but
if his love does not have this sexual
element, it ceases to be homosexual.
Appetite is not love. Sexual
attraction and love are not the same
thing. Yet it is impossible to
describe and define homosexuality
without discerning sexual attraction
as the necessary base or core. For
what is homosexuality if not a sexual
preference or orientation? At the end
of the day, love, however desirable,
is secondary if not altogether
superfluous to a relationship's being
a homosexual relationship.
All of this
serves to illustrate that "Love is
love" is not apropos to the discussion
of gay marriage. Love is not intrinsic
to sexual attraction, sexual
preference, or sexual orientation, but
subsidiary. This is not to say
that a homosexual does not love, but
that a homosexual is homosexual
because of his sexual preferences, and
a preference is not the same thing as
a love. Sexual attraction can mature
into something more than mere desire,
but the fact remains that love is not
homosexuality's essential or
characteristic attribute. It doesn't
imbue the warm fuzzies to say it, but
when talking about homosexuality,
"love" is extraneous. What about when
we talk about marriage?
Love Is
Love Is Marriage?
What is the relationship between love
and marriage? It sounds heartless, but
love is not the indispensable and
defining feature of marriage.
Stability, fidelity, intimacy, and
love are all good and important
things, but the demarcating essence
of marriage is rooted in the
biological fact that we human beings
reproduce sexually, and that our
offspring require an unquantifiable
amount of care and education. The
unique capacity for a man and a woman
to become a mated pair makes marriage
so distinct and different from all
other kinds of companionship. Don't
get me wrong: marriage is a
comprehensive union of love, but if
the couple cannot become one flesh, is
their union comprehensive? In
other words, is love the distinctive
feature of marriage?
Love is love, but "marriage is not
simply a ratification of an existing
love. It is the conversion of that
love into a biological and social
continuity. The essence of that
continuity is children," George Gilder
wrote in 1986. He continues:
Regardless of what
reasons particular couples may give
for getting married, the deeper
evolutionary and sexual propensities
explain the persistence of the
institution. All sorts of superficial
variations – from homosexual marriage
to companionate partnership – may be
played on the primal themes of human
life. But the themes remain. The
natural fulfillment of love is a
child; the fantasies and projects of
the childless couple may well be
considered as surrogate children.
It's unromantic but true
– a marriage need not be amorous or
passionate to be a marriage. But
it must be consummated. If I may refer
to canon law, if a marriage has been
ratified but not consummated, it may be
annulled. Ratum sed non consummatum.
Marriage is sexual by definition, sexual
in that it must be consummated. And for
a marriage to be consummated, the couple
must have performed the act that
fulfills the behavioral conditions of
procreation. Any other kind of sexual
activity, including an interrupted sex
act, or anal or oral sex, cannot qualify
as consummation because these acts
cannot potentially result in the
conception of a child.
Apart from its unique suitability to the
conception and rearing of children,
everything else about marriage is
plastic and derivative. Love is
desirable and attendant, but sexual
complementarity is primary and
essential.
Now, it could be asked, if a man and a
woman "have sex" outside of wedlock
(thus engaging in what I am calling
marriage's distinctive feature), does my
argument imply that they're somehow
automatically married? Not exactly . . .
but perhaps here we can appreciate, if
only for a moment, the moral opprobrium
our forebears put on fornication – it is
a mockery of marriage, coitus without
commitment, and who will raise the
child? Marriage exists precisely because
a man and a woman can become one flesh
in a unique and powerful way, sex and
babies are linked, and again, who will
raise the child?
Marriage,
Historically
Western culture has, of course, for
hundreds of years recoiled from the idea
of marrying for anything other than
love, specifically "romantic love," and
pop music and pulp fiction only fan our
uncritical praise of autonomous
marriage-for-love. But historically
marriage was much less sentimental and
much more practical. Recognizing without
resentment the link between sex and
children, our forebears found arranged
marriages (which should not be confused
with forced marriages) intuitive. The
courtship of a man and a woman in the
context of the extended family and the
community; the wooing and deliberation
and eventual consent; the public
formation of the bonds of matrimony
before God and man; the coming together
to form a mated pair and, Lord willing,
to produce specific children that will
be legally and recognizably theirs; the
establishment of a household and the
fulfillment of a vital function in the
community – all of this, as might be
expected, is obscured by a culture that
shrugs and laughs, "Hey, love is love,"
as if this somehow proves that any
grouping of any number of consenting
adults for any reason at all can be a
"marriage."
Not every loving relationship is
entitled to be a marriage – not even a
deeply affectionate, peacefully
cohabiting, child-raising, and life-long
relationship. Matthew and Marilla
Cuthbert loved each other deeply,
adopted and raised Anne together, and
even lived together until their dying
days – but they were not married nor
even entitled to marry, at least not to
marry each other. As siblings, their
mutual esteem and tenderness for one
another were not at all sexual. And this
brings us back to the distinctive
feature of marriage, which is not love.
What kind of "love" entitles anyone to
marry? Though a Nicholas Sparks novel
would suggest otherwise, romantic love (amor,or
a crude version of eros) is
hardly the sine qua non of marriage. Nor
is self-giving or even God-like love (agape
or caritas) the distinctive
feature that makes marriage different
from every other relationship. The love
of friends (amicitia or philia)
is certainly not marriage's essential
element, nor is the love of slippers (storge),
nor is benevolent kindness (philanthropia),
nor brotherly love (philadelphia),
nor the love that comes through seeing (lubovatsia),
nor even the love of selective
preference and judgment (dilectio),
nor any other kind of love.
Marriage is not just an amplified
version of a loving relationship, but an
altogether different kind of
loving relationship grounded in the
biological fact of human sexual
complementarity. True, a husband and
wife share a common life that is not
only physical but also financial,
emotional, moral, intellectual,
spiritual, and loving. But the
comprehensiveness of this sharing is distinct
from other kinds of relationships in its
unique suitability for the
begetting and rearing of children.
Different
in Kind
The fabulous, symbolic, synthetic
sterility of sodomy – it is not at all
the same thing as the coming together of
a man and a woman to form a mated pair.
The natural fitness and potential
fruitfulness of sexual intercourse is an
altogether different kind of
thing from the jest, the imitation, that
is anal sex. The latter is all engine.
Though the motion of the moving parts
might lead to orgasm, anatomy cries out
against it. When two identical straight
edges come together, like a pair of
scissors, they cannot create, only cut.
Yet it is precisely because human
sexuality is creative that
marriage came into being in the first
place. Again, the distinctive feature of
marriage is not love but sex.
Don't get me wrong – I am not suggesting
that sex ought to be severed from
affection. Not at all. In fact, when a
culture such as ours makes sex the
prerequisite for love, rather than love
being the condition for bodily union,
sex paradoxically leaves men and women
isolated from one another, and C. S.
Lewis reminds us that isolation is the
principle on which "the whole philosophy
of hell rests." Our culture obsesses
over sex, but, to quote Lewis again,
"when natural things look most divine,
the demonic is just around the corner."
Short-order sex, consumer sex, sex for
the sake of sex – sex without love is
dehumanizing. "Coitus without
coexistence is a demonic affair," Karl
Barth has said. In Harvey Cox's
phrasing, it reduces the beloved to a
"playboy accessory." Marriage is
absolutely a comprehensive union of love,
but again – if the couple cannot become
one flesh, is their union comprehensive?
Love and sexual complementarity are not
coordinate: they do not belong to the
same order. The fact of sexual polarity
clings more tenaciously to marriage than
the feeling of "love." Love is
the lifeblood of a marriage, granted,
but love is not enough to make a
marriage. The sine qua non of marriage,
the thing that makes it recognizably
different, not just in degree but in
kind, from every other relationship, is
sexual complementarity. No matter how
sincerely people who identify as gay
might love each other, if they are not
able to perform the act that fulfills
the behavioral conditions of
procreation, they are simply unable to
marry one another. Nor should they have
any need to marry one another: a
homosexual relationship, by definition,
has nothing to do with generativity and
childbirth, domestication and rearing,
concern for lineage, and the terrible
and irrevocable plighting of troth "till
death do us part."
Marriage-for-Love,
R.I.P.
When the most basic value of autonomous
marriage is that we should marry for
love, specifically romantic love, is it
any surprise that the meaning of
marriage would be reduced to "Love is
love"? In gay marriage, this blinkered
vision of marriage finds its furthest
and most extreme expression. Gay
marriage has stretched the definition of
marriage to the breaking point. So
ruined, a wedding is now little more
than a celebration of love.
But is "love" a trustworthy guide to
marriage? As young lovers eventually
discover, if they're listening, sexual
desire and romantic love do not
guarantee that you will love wisely or
well. Love is love, but Augustine
reminds us that our loves can be
disordered. It is possible to love the
wrong things well and to love the right
things badly. Love sins, and marriage is
difficult. Despite its comforts and
joys, marriage remains fundamentally
restricting, burdensome, sexually
limiting, serious, and not to be entered
into unadvisedly or lightly. As the
years add up, the real question facing
married couples is: Can love survive
marriage?
"Let us hope," we read in the opening
scenes of writer-director Ali Selim's
felicitous movie debut Sweet Land,
a provocative conversation-starter about
the meaning of marriage, "that we are
all preceded in this world by a love
story." Love story or not, the fact
remains that all of us are preceded by
one man and one woman, hopefully in the
bonds of wedlock. The inalienable
right to marry rests not in love
stories but in sexual complementarity
and will, in the simple fact that one
man and one woman will to be
married.
No kind of love entitles anyone to
marry, but there is a love appropriate
to marriage. More than a feeling, it is
an act of the will. It is the love that
cannot be "earned," and there is nothing
anyone can do to lose it. Though it
desires union and togetherness – desires
to become one with the beloved –
it seeks less to be loved than to love.
It desires not only that the beloved
"feel good," but also that things truly
go well for her. It is the love that
continues God's universal approval of
creation, the love that says, "It is good
that you exist!" It is the love St. Paul
speaks of when he exhorts wives to
submit to their husbands and husbands to
love their wives as Christ loved and
sacrificed himself for the Church.
Submission and sacrifice – these are the
twin ironies by which great marriages
are made, and the agonizing pincer-jaws
of heaven. It is the love that wills
to be married, the love willing to
submit and to sacrifice, a total
self-gift unto death. This is
the love appropriate for wedding the two
halves of the human race, male and
female, in matrimony, the love most
suitable for begetting and rearing
children, the love that dares to join
the Creator in creating even
more human beings, life, another life!
It is a high and impossible calling, but
it is expressed in ordinary, daily
graces – cleaning the toilet, cooking
dinner, taking out the trash, forgiving,
listening, remembering tiny details,
saying a kind word. Such a love is the
basis of civilization, and there is
nothing romantic about it.
Still the
Foundation
Today's man, already distracted by
self-consciousness, lonely, insulated
from reality by his abstract thoughts,
and constantly on the cliff's edge of
his fantastic desires, must also reckon
with the institutionalization of marital
confusion. Teens and young adults,
especially those raised by divorced
parents, overburdened by pornography and
sappy romantic imitations of love,
handed condoms and pills and ample free
time, distrustful of marriage and afraid
to marry, cohabiting yet longing to
settle down and start a family someday,
are hardly equipped to appreciate the
permanent and irreducible truths about
men, women, and marriage. Are
gender-neutral individualism and gay
theory capable of disciplining erotic
desire in the direction of marriage? Who
will show them a still more excellent
way?
The "new insights" that make gay
marriage appear harmless, even good,
also make human history appear harmful
and bad. So obviously the story of generations,
human history remains the story of the
coming together of a man and a woman to
form a mated pair, socially recognized
in the bonds of matrimony, forming as a
family the very foundation of
civilization. This is our shared
heritage. Marriage – the conjugal union
of one man and one woman for life –
remains an honorable estate. In the end,
no matter how catchy the slogan, no
matter how coercive the law, marriage
wins.
This article was
originally published in the
May/June 2016 Issue of Touchstone:
A Journal of Mere Christianity,
copyright © 2016 the Fellowship of
St. James. Used with permission by
the author and by Touchstone. Touchstone
is a monthly ecumenical journal
which endeavors to promote
doctrinal, moral, and devotional
orthodoxy among Roman Catholics,
Protestants, and Orthodox.
Tyler Blanski
graduated from the Perpich
Center for Arts Education in
2002, studied at the Centre for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies
at Oxford in 2005, and holds a
bachelor of arts from Hillsdale
College, Michigan, USA 2006. He
is the author of When
Donkeys Talk: Rediscovering
the Mystery and Wonder of
Christianity (Zondervan,
2012). He lives in Minnesota
with his wife and two children
Top
illustration of
Jesus at the
Cana wedding
celebration,
artwork by
Michael O'Brien
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