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10. Marriage: fulfillment through sexual gift and union
We have considered the interactive role of sex in the development of the human person. Sexuality, in its natural design, has an inherent power to draw the person out of self and above self: rising out of self-centeredness through the inspiration of new values hitherto perhaps only vaguely experienced in one's self, and never in the totally singular way that they are now found in another.
That the sexual attraction can also present itself in an egocentric and grasping way, at times even violently, is undeniable; a fact which gives the impression that some original plan for man seems to have gone wrong, especially with regard to sexuality, since this now appears as a mysteriously problematic area of life where truly human appreciation and admiration too often run the danger of being submerged in mere physical desire. So true is this that if sexual formation does not succeed in awakening and inculcating a more properly human awareness of sexuality, as an admirable complement to interpersonal existence, merely physical-bodily attraction will tend to radically mold the attitude of each sex towards the other, with the result that an individual of the other sex is seen more and more as a body to be desired and enjoyed, and progressively less as a person to be admired and respected..
In married life itself, the conjugal act, which should be the most unique expression of married love and union, can in practice - unless there is extreme care and delicacy on the part of the spouses - become an act of one-sided egoistic possession rather than a love-act of mutual donation. Then it separates rather than unites. However, these conflictive aspects of sexuality are marginal to our considerations here.
The sexes mutually attract and should inspire each other. For Julián Marías the hope of human happiness is largely polarized in the other sex: "Perhaps the greatest focal point of happiness lies in the relationship with the other sex" [1]. Most people still consider that the fulfillment of this hope is to be found in marriage. Is this romantic expectation, which seems to have always accompanied mankind, a mere illusion? Would the human condition be better if we could get rid of this hope or see it die out?
The common and general attraction between the sexes tends to become particularized in one man and one woman being specially drawn to each other. They sense a unique complementarity which may gradually lead on to a desire for a personal union - not in a transient way but on a permanent basis. This radical interpersonal heterosexual union has (with isolated exceptions) characterized human society and been the lot or aspiration of the immense majority of mankind from the start. It is this union which we call marriage.
It is striking that although from the earliest recorded times marriage has been subject to degeneration and degradation - such as polygamy and polyandry, or marital tyranny and abuse - the aspiration of finding a special companion of the opposite sex - a spouse - with whom to share life, with its ups and downs, has been a constant in human history, regarded by almost everyone as a major goal for personal fulfillment and a necessary condition of happiness.
In fact it is hard to say which is more remarkable: that universal literature has celebrated human love with many more romances based on its hopes and aspirations than comedies or tragedies based on its deceptions; or that each successive generation, despite accumulated experience, has failed to lapse into cynicism about marriage [2], continuing to encourage their youngers to look for a good match, and celebrating one marriage after another as an event to be marked by particular family and social joy. We do not tend to congratulate the person who is making a speculation on the Stock Exchange; yet we rejoice with the one who is getting married.
It would be doubtful progress for civilization if the joy of a wedding lost its peculiar quality, and were regarded or listened to with skepticism.
Sexual giving and conjugal giving
Human love between a man and a woman, if deep and genuine, develops into a desire for union in both body and soul. Ideally these two aspects of human sexual love - love of body and love of soul - should be in harmony; in practice they often are not. If the bodily aspect is let assert itself too much, the spiritual growth of love may be arrested or even destroyed. The natural physical instinct of love is to possess the body: its natural spiritual instinct is to respect the person. Love, if it is true, quickly senses the danger latent in a touch, a caress, a kiss; and refrains - or cuts the physical act short once it realizes that what perhaps began as a tender expression of self-giving affection is quickly turning into a thoughtless desire for egoistic self-satisfaction.
If an incipient sexual attraction is to lead on to and mature into a marriage with a real promise of happiness to it, the couple need to ensure that the sexual instinct - always present, and in itself inclined to mere bodily union - is not let get ahead of the conjugal decision by which a man and a woman make a complete surrender of themselves, in body and in person, to one another, so forming a union capable of fulfilling all the human meaning of sexuality. To give one's body without giving one's self is to turn one's human sexuality into a lie; it is to deceive another, and or to be deceived by him or her, in the very truth that human love demands. To give oneself, temporarily, in and with one's body, is not really to give but just to lend. Nothing is actually given, unless it is totally given - for keeps. To "lend" oneself, in the sexual use of one's body, is to degrade the dignity of self, of body, and of sexuality.
So, in passing from friendship to love to engagement, on the way that leads to marriage, it is important to bear in mind that certain corporal signs have different meanings in themselves, and that even the same sign can be made to express different attitudes or emotions. A handshake can be cold or warm; an artificially warm handshake tends to introduce an element of insincerity into a relationship. A kiss between lovers is seldom less than warm; all the more reason for those who are not yet married but both love and wish to respect each other, not to permit an expression of affection that in itself signifies a greater and more total dedication than their present mutual situation warrants. If each is fully sincere with himself or herself and equally so with the other, it will be easier to recognize what is adequate - or not - to the situation in which they find themselves; what is a true expression of their love as it presently exists not just in feeling but in actual personal commitment based on mutual respect, and what would be a false expression, because it seeks to take all it can get without being definitively prepared and pledged to give all it can give.
When two unmarried persons allow the physical attraction between them to find its outlet in sexual intercourse - in other words, in what of its nature is a conjugal act - then they are either "playing at being married" (play-acting which has a disastrous effect on the real thing if it comes), or else they are simply reducing the sexual act itself - which is humanly meant to be a sign of total, enduring and unconditional self-surrender - to a mere (though perhaps more intense) expression of what is as yet but a temporary and uncommitted affection. In either case they have already ensured that their physical union with the person whom they may eventually marry can never be experienced as what it is designed to be: a unique act shared only with the spouse for whom one has kept oneself, and with whom now at last one experiences a union never before known.
The spousal love of an engaged person is meant to have a virginal consummation. Only those who endeavor to come to marriage as virgins can experience the truly singular joy of marital donation. This is the positive meaning and value of virginity: to keep oneself so as to give, to have something unique to give, in a gift that is given only to a spouse.
If a person wants to give himself, he must first possess that self. Self-possession is not shown by promptness of feelings or strength of desire, but by self-control. A feeling towards another person is seldom to be trusted - and the other person should seldom trust its expressions - unless it has been checked and confirmed by both mind and will.
The passage from friendship to attraction, from attraction to engagement, from engagement to wedding, is the gradual transition - which only in its last stage becomes definitive - from "you and I" to "us". The "we" of a married couple is something unique - a "we" that can almost be conjugated in the singular.
The conjugal instinct tends towards an interpersonal donation and acceptance of a quite singular nature: a privileged and committed choice of a "partner" in a common life enterprise where each spouse "belongs" in a unique way to the other. The donation is mutual, and implies mutual acceptance. Mutual gift and acceptance are of the essence of the interpersonal marital covenant.
Conjugal love calls for total gift and total acceptance. This two-way challenge of totality is posed by the very nature of such love. To know oneself loved is among the greatest needs of the human person. Yet no one can reasonably expect to have this need satisfied unless he or she is ready to love. The quality of love one is prepared to give in marriage is the most one can hope to receive.
T. S. Eliot echoes the aspirations and the possible deceptions: "Oh, I thought that I was giving him so much, and he to me! And the giving and the taking seemed so right: not in terms of calculation of what was good for the persons we had been, but for the new person, us. And then I found we were only strangers. And that there had been neither giving nor taking, but that we had merely made use of each other, each for his purpose. That's horrible. Can we only love something created by our own imagination? Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone, then lover and beloved are equally unreal; and the dreamer is no more real than his dreams" [3].
Giving - or just lending - one's self?
A gift, we have noted, is not a loan. Whoever only loans, never gives. He or she "gives" for a time, but holds on to that "temporary gift". It is mine; I can always claim it back.
Loans are a significant element in social life. The trust and the ease with which one can lend or borrow a book or a tennis racquet are a good test of the quality of life in a community. But loans and gifts need to be distinguished. If they are not, misunderstandings or quarrels easily arise, as when someone thinks they are receiving as a gift what was intended as a mere loan, or, conversely, someone claims that he only intended to loan what he had in fact originally given. Commercial loans and rentals, where one pays for the use of money or services or property, are also important for the more effective working of society. Their terms and the extent of the claims they give rise to are usually well spelt out in legal documents.
Marriage stands outside all of these social or commercial arrangements or categories. It is not a loan or a mortgage or a hiring; nor is it a commercial purchase with a "money back if not satisfied" guarantee. It is a gift, a mutual gift made between two persons, each one giving self as a spouse and accepting the spousal gift of the other.
Marriage is not, "I lend myself to you", but "I give myself". Marriage is not "I accept you - on trial; or for thirty days, or until you break down, or no longer give me satisfaction". It is: "I accept you".
Anything less than such a gift is not marriage. I lend myself, or I accept you "for a time" or "on this or that condition", is not marriage. People who understand marriage in such a way or who "marry" on such terms, do not really marry at all. They may say they tried marriage and it failed. What failed was not marriage, for they never married at all.
In a genuine marriage, the couple can say, 'we belong to one another', because there has been a true marital gift. In a trial marriage, the couple can say, at most, 'we are on loan to each other, and neither of us can tell if or when the other may take back what he or she has lent'.
Some people, perhaps realizing the insincerity of "trial marriage", prefer just to cohabit, for as long as they get on or it suits one of them. It is a poor sexual choice, involving a limited self-donation. It shows little appreciation of one's partner, or little ability to give oneself, or both together: little love, in short.
By married consent a union is established between man and woman that is interpersonal and conjugal. Despite their mutual "belonging", the personal identity - including the freedom and responsibility - of each partner is naturally inalienable. The interpersonal union of two persons does not result in one person, but in one unique married relationship.
Unilateral self-donation, without the corresponding gift of the other, would be a form of voluntary servitude. Apparent self-donation, not accompanied by a generous other-acceptance, could be a cloak of sentimental selfishness or, worse still, of a calculating instrumentalization of the other person.
As a decision to face the whole of life together, to form an interpersonal "alliance for life" that will end only with death, and to devote themselves together to perpetuating life and love in a family, marriage is certainly not an undertaking for individualists. The individualistic priority is to seek self, protect self, hold on to self... Unless one wages war on such an approach, one will never be able to give self. The most one will manage is an interested, calculated and temporary loan of self; which is not enough for marriage.
For individualists, a real marital decision is always hard. If they do truly marry (already a big step in the process of becoming less individualist), they will still find it hard to make their marriage a success. Hard - but not impossible. On the contrary, if the love that inspired their marital decision was genuine, the decision itself already marks a first major break with the self-centered and self-protective attitude of individualism. Married life remains a continuing challenge to open out from self and self-seeking to something far more worthwhile. If what inspires the challenge is love, the contest can be won.
All of us tend of course to be individualists; and we need to be personalists, discovering, understanding, responding to values in others. Nowhere is this personalist quest more vital than in marriage.
Self-donation is a step to overcome the selfishness that always tends to block and frustrate interpersonal relations; but it is a step that needs completion. In the case of marriage, one's self-donation is not real or effective if it does not involve the conjugal acceptance of the other. "Love can endure only as a unity in which a mature 'we' finds clear expression, and will not endure as a combination of two egoisms, at the base of the structure of which two 'I's are clearly visible. The structure of love is that of an interpersonal communion" [4].
Conjugal love is the highest form of human love, higher even than parental or filial love. Yet one should note what might seem peculiar but is logical. Being higher, it is harder to live. It is not often that parents abandon their children; children more often leave their parents. A lack of conjugal fidelity, even as an isolated episode, has always been regarded as a grave act of betrayal. A society which begins to consider such a betrayal as something to be expected and almost normal - as seems to be happening in some parts of the West today - shows a grave loss of its human values.
The three essential properties of marriage
Three principal characteristics distinguish marriage from other relationships between persons and indicate its uniqueness as an interpersonal communion. These are: the exclusiveness of the relationship (the man accepts the woman as his only wife, the woman accepts the man as her only husband); the permanence - until death - of the union in which they commit themselves; the readiness to share with the other spouse, and with him or her alone, one's own complementary procreative power.
Together these values place each of the spouses in a singular and privileged situation towards the other. The eminently personalist character of these values and of the relationship they constitute and characterize, ought to be obvious (even if some people appear not to see it). No less evident is the correspondence of these values to the most fundamental aspirations of human love: "I am yours; you are mine; we belong to each other"; "for always; "in a union whose fruit will be a child which, being ours, will at the same time be the incarnation of our love". It is extremely important to grasp that these three main characteristics or values [5] of marriage - its unity, its openness to children, the unbreakable nature of the spouses' relationship - are of an essentially human and personalist nature.
It is also important to seek the intrinsic justification (which is much the same as saying the natural good) of these constitutional values of marriage; otherwise one could yield to the modern complex that considers them artificial impositions with which an outdated tradition wishes to restrict personal freedom. The fact is that they represent fundamental modes by which spousal love between a man and a woman finds free and concrete expression. They are links which persons in love desire to create. For them they are a source of joy. No sound anthropology can accept that people regard the prospect of remaining definitively bound to the one they love, as too risky for personal happiness. The risk, for whoever is really in love, is not to find oneself too bound to the loved one, but rather to see love dissolve or to lose it through a lack of commitment.
"But, if the other person leaves me in the end, I too want to be 'free'..." Genuine love does not reason that way. Yes; it is true that one cannot absolutely answer for the love or fidelity of the other person; but some uncertainty in that sense always remains in human relations. The love that is deep and genuine does everything in its power - it binds itself to the maximum to the beloved one - and it trusts (it can do no more) that the unconditional sincerity of its own love will provoke and guarantee an equally committed love in the other person. For that very reason, a love which bases itself on calculation is not a genuine love, and will be met with an equally superficial love, limited in its scope and not likely to last. "The fear of making a permanent commitment can change the mutual love of husband and wife into two loves of self - two loves existing side by side until they end in separation" [6].
In love, just as in life itself when all is said and done, one risks everything. Whoever wants to eliminate risk at any cost, ends up disqualified for a life or a love with a truly human purpose or dimension [7].
If you give yourself, you grow; and in that sense become more vulnerable to attack. If you don't give yourself, you remain smaller and perhaps easier to protect. But it is your egoism that you will be protecting, and you will find it attacked from every quarter.
The major, in Hemingway's story "In Another Country", worships his wife. When she dies, he exclaims, "A man must not marry. If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that". The cry is understandable as an anguished reaction in a moment of near-despair. But it is not true to the psychology of love or of values. What is really worth loving is really worth committing oneself to - even if we know we must lose it in the end (humanly speaking, after all, everything will eventually be lost).
Suffering, perhaps a lot of it, is indeed likely to result from any intense interpersonal commitment which breaks down. But only weak personalities are held back by the fear of possible future emotional injury from committing themselves to a present love which deeply attracts them. Such a lack of commitment, when commitment is worthwhile, will leave their character marked with the sign and awareness of failure.
The unbreakable nature of the marriage bond constitutes a guarantee that a person is not going to be used, and then tossed aside. Each spouse has a right to that guarantee coming from the other, and the duty to give it; and if he or she does not feel capable of this, then the duty not lead the other into deception.
Marriage, seen in this overall personalistic and human light, is essentially a mutual and generous self-gift directed to the good of the spouses and to offspring. The modern tendency to see marriage not as a commitment but as a way of self-satisfaction, as an adjunct to passing pleasure or as a mutual arrangement for temporary companionship, drains any sexual relationship of its immense potential for happiness and fulfillment. One trivializes marriage by regarding it as a "useful" facet to life, which must always be open to change - on a par with a house or a car or a hobby. To allow the approach, "this relationship will last as long as its advantages outweigh its disadvantages for me", is to treat one's partner as a prop to selfishness, as an article and not as a person, and less still as a spouse - whom one wants to make happy.
United, but distinct
The challenge of marriage is to create a unity between two distinct persons, with the peculiarity that it is created around, and not at the cost of, the differences between them. If the attempt to create this unity fails, the ensuing separation will leave each of the two more immersed than before in individual loneliness. It is not by dint of changing the other that each will reach and integrate into marital unity, but rather by changing oneself and adapting to the other. Whoever really loves, wants to do whatever the beloved one wants. Marriage is not a process of reformation of one's partner, but of adaptation of oneself. This way each one reforms himself or herself, and so becomes a more open and loving person.
A couple must learn to love one another with their defects. Since we are all self-centered, there is more realism than cynicism in the idea that the marriage covenant is "a mutual commitment between two egoists to help each other to form a bond stronger than their individual selfishnesses". Nor should one cynically appraise the confidence that persons in love have in such cases in the power of their love to overcome selfishness.
In the same way, conjugal love must build upon the real factors characterizing such an interpersonal situation. A main factor is certainly present in the different ways of being of each spouse. "I - as I am": "You - as you are": these are two existential facts to be integrated into the relationship. This is possible only if conjugal love is real - that is, committed and voluntary, rather than simply emotional - and one strives to make the voluntary aspect prevail, when necessary, over the emotional.
Conjugal love may or may not be accompanied by feelings. It is not essential that such love be emotional, it is essential that it be voluntary. That is what makes it committed love. Genuine love is love of the will; it loves with facts, not just with words. "What I am", is a fact (not "what you think I am"); "love me as I am - with my defects; and I pledge to try to love you too in the same way". Conjugal love is always ready to learn.
It is not easy to accept a person as he or she really is. There will sometimes be rebellions and strong temptations to abandon the other spouse. But if one has taken one's commitment in earnest, it is a question of beginning again. "I will love you with your defects", is the norm for married persons. To live up to it requires generosity and humility, expressed above all in the readiness to begin and to begin again, and time and again.
In certain cases the defects of the other spouse may provoke pity for oneself, rather than impatience or rebellion towards one's partner. This self-pity, which can especially beset some married women, is worse, for it induces a paralysing passivity that impedes the efforts necessary to save or restablish a normal marital relationship.
David Copperfield's Aunt Betsey was a bossy but wise woman. She refused to intervene to correct or form the very childish girl her nephew had married: "You have chosen freely for yourself, and you have chosen a very pretty and a very affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too, to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, you must just accustom yourself to do without them.... This is marriage" [8].
Two people can only remain united in marital love if their continuing efforts are aimed at building a true conjugal union which has gradually acquired the strength and unifying power that marriage in its natural design should have. Those who ignore this design are likely to find that whatever they build fails to draw each out of the dominant self-centeredness which is always the real obstacle to happiness; and that in the end it proves too fragile to last.
For a marriage to work it is not enough that the couple learn to love one another. They have to love something else together. The more noble that something else is, the more strength it will give to unite them and keep them in love and growing in love.
Humanity is at his highest when it gives itself. And self-giving is at its highest when it is creative. Through conjugal sexuality, man and woman find a creative form of self-giving.
The natural plan of marriage is that it should issue in children - the normal fruit of the physical union of husband and wife and the sign of their mutual openness to the potential of their shared sexuality. There is no truly fulfilling marital relationship unless it is open to offspring. A marriage so closed "on itself" that it does not want children is bound to fail, for if the spouses are not open to children - to the fruit of their sexual union - they are not fully open to the richness of their love, nor are they unreservedly open to one another.
The fulfillment of unity between the spouses "represents both a task and a challenge. The task involves the spouses in living out their original covenant. The children born to them - and here is the challenge - should consolidate that covenant, enriching and deepening the conjugal communion of the father and mother. When this does not occur, we need to ask if the selfishness which lurks even in the love of man and woman as a result of the human inclination to evil is not stronger than this love. Married couples need to be well aware of this" [9].
The physical union of the spouses, if fruitful, never gives rise to an identical fruit. Each child is a different fruit, a new incarnated expression, of the same conjugal love. Spouses re-express themselves in each child. In a large family, love has had many expressions.
Children do not pull parents apart; they unite them. So often the children are the factor that keeps parents united. It is lack of children - or, more concretely, the refusal of children - that can pull spouses apart. "We don't want another child", is the same as saying, "we don't want another bond of union. We have two already". Two may be too few to keep you united.
The conjugal act
Marriage originates in the spouses' consent, their decision to share life in its blending of joys and sorrows. Their union is consummated by sexual intercourse which in marriage is called the conjugal act precisely because of the unique way in which it ratifies that original marital decision. Spouses understand the true significance of their conjugal intercourse when they see it not mainly as a pleasure-giving act but more fundamentally still as a life-sharing act.
Marital sexual union is of an essentially different nature to sexual intercourse between animals. In animals, intercourse is a response to instinct and is simply aimed at procreation; which is also why animals are naturally promiscuous. Human sexual intercourse has a deeper intrinsic meaning than just procreation. It is a privileged conjugal function, which for this very reason too loses its meaning when it is promiscuous.
To be humanly natural, the conjugal act must make sense, not containing in itself some inner contradiction. If it does not express what it seems to express, it lacks sincerity and is a form of deception. What then does the conjugal act express or correspond to? The desire to share in a pleasure-experience with the spouse one loves? As we have just suggested, the significance and importance of the conjugal act goes beyond this. Over and above the sharing of pleasure, it should express, in all truth and fullness, the special relationship of life and love that exists between the spouses, effecting a union of their persons which singularly signifies that love. It is only within marriage that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman can express and effect this. Outside marriage, it takes on an element of falsehood, it becomes a lie, because what it says, or seems to say, is not what is intended by those sharing in it.
Hence, the unique naturalness of sexual intercourse within marriage derives not from the fact that it is a means for procreation, nor that it procures particular sense satisfaction; but that it is, in its integrity, the most qualified (though certainly not the only) expression of marital love.
By the conjugal act spouses most singularly show their mutual giving and acceptance of each other. It expresses the exclusive nature of their relation inasmuch as it is the one act they will under no circumstances share with any third person. It is conjugal precisely because it unites two persons in its spousal meaning.
Nothing can unite them more, provided they live the fullness of donation and acceptance implied - signified - in the act. It is all important to make an adequate analysis of what gives marital intercourse its unique singularity [10]. Conjugal intercourse is an act of union, which is at the same time a generative act. These two aspects can be distinguished. The question then arises: can they be separated? And more to the point still, can conjugal intercourse retain its nature as an act of union, if its reproductive orientation is cancelled?
A proper examination of this question needs to take due account of the fact that while conjugal intercourse is evidently a procreative act in itself (an act naturally ordered to procreation), what qualifies it to be a special act of love-union is not so evident. That sexual intercourse is of itself an act ordered to procreation is obvious, since it consists in a meeting of the genital organs leading naturally to the fusion of the masculine and feminine procreative elements. That sexual intercourse is in itself an act of love is not however obvious, especially as it can clearly not be an act of love at all, e.g. as in the case of rape or prostitution.
What element can one distinguish in sexual intercourse between husband and wife which justifies its being regarded as such a distinctive expression of marital love and of the desire for marital union that it is rightly called the "conjugal act"? Not the pleasure which normally accompanies the act; for then an act without pleasure (as can happen perhaps more especially in the case of the woman) would be lacking an element essential to make it an act of union.
No; it is not the pleasure which may or may not accompany it [11], it is what actually takes place in the act, that gives it its unique power to express married love and union. And what takes place is precisely the mutual sharing in reciprocal procreative power.
The singularity of marital sexual intercourse is that in it each spouse in effect says to the other: "with you and with you alone, I am prepared to share this unique life-oriented power that a man and a woman possess and can actuate together".
Every conscious human act signifies something. Actions are the most expressive form of language. They may not speak louder than words, but they should speak no less sincerely. There is something wrong when a person intentionally drains an action of its natural significance, as in the case of the insincere handshake. Then one is engaging in deception of others, and perhaps also in self-deception.
This mutual deception is present in marital contraceptive intercourse. Even if accompanied by love, it involves too much inner contradiction to be an expression of conjugal union. For it always signifies the rejection - the refusal to accept - part of the other person. It drains sexuality of its most richly human and conjugal character - the sharing together of a life-giving experience - and reduces it to the level of a simple sharing of pleasure. Contraceptive intercourse is rather an anti-sexual than a sexual act; it is marked by the fear of sexuality in its full unitive meaning.
The contraceptive spouse rejects his or her partner's conjugal sexuality precisely in its most complementary and truly unitive aspect - its power to create and perpetuate through mutual love. The uniqueness of the marital act being reduced to pleasure, its spousal significance is gone. This spousal significance is in fact contradicted. The husband, in rejecting the wife's fertility, rejects her as spouse. By the act of intercourse, she is made no more unique to him than any other woman. Nor is he made more unique to her than any other man. Conjugal uniqueness is no longer present. Instead of husband and wife, the spouses are merely a man and a woman. Contraceptive sex makes husband and wife strangers to each other.
In contraception the spouses say to one another: I do not trust this bodily expression of love. I do not trust my body, I do not trust your body. Contraceptive love is calculating by nature. And the love of a calculator, or two calculators together, can never be wholly trusted.
Taking is not giving, although in a mutual gift one takes as well as gives. Taking without giving is not love. Sexual intercourse is only a love-act if it shows and involves self-giving. One does not give oneself to things, one simply takes and uses them; hence, if one does not give oneself in marital intercourse, if one only takes, one is using the other person and treating him or her as a thing.
Through contraception, the other spouse is reduced from the status of wife or husband to that of sexual playmate. A contraceptive marriage, where there is no real physical intercourse or union at all, is likely to die of sexual undernourishment, for the couple do not meet in true sexual intimacy or nourish each other sexually as true spouses.
A different (though no less destructive) contradiction marks the relationship of a couple who engage in pre-marital or extra-marital sex. In this case the lie or contradiction - between what their act means in itself (total self-donation and other-acceptance) and their actual uncommitted or conditional relationship - is not necessarily the refusal of openness to the possible fruit of their union (that openness might be present), but the rejection of their mutual self-gift in its totality. An unlimited and mutual giving is not yet willed (one or both not being prepared for total giving), or is simply not possible (one or both being bound by an existing marital relationship).
Commercial sex, casual sex, promiscuous sex, temporary or trial sex, have in the end little to distinguish them. They all reduce the sexual gift of self to a insignificant thing, an incident to be bought or sold, a minor favor to be bestowed on acquaintances or temporary friends, or a satisfaction to be sought (eagerly no doubt) and, once received, scarcely appreciated until perhaps its need is felt again.
An act by which an intense sensation is shared by two persons can confer a passing uniqueness on their relationship. But if the act itself is marked by an inherent contradiction, as is also the case of extramarital sex, then rather than being united and fulfilled, the two are afterwards left emptier and farther apart because the sensation does not pertain, as it should by its nature, to an act signifying a deeper union - a union which they either do not want or cannot truly create. They are not yet bound, or they are held apart by other bonds from which they are not free.
Since sexual intercourse (the conjugal act) is the most singular expression of the married relationship, adultery has always been considered the maximum violation of the mutual matrimonial pact and, as we have noted, one of the worst betrayals of human trust.
Complementary differences
Marriage is a consortium [12] or partnership between two persons who are equal in dignity and rights, but not therefore identical in function and specific roles. On the contrary, marriage is of its essence a complementary relationship; and complementariness implies difference. Recalling what we saw in the last chapter - that man and woman are equal, but different - we can say that marriage represents a totally unique meeting between their complementary differences. The successful development of the married community depends on the harmony achieved between two persons who stand in the relation not of friends or associates, but of spouses - where sexual diversity is fundamental to the constitution of their relationship.
When the man fulfils his role as husband and father, and the woman, hers as wife and mother, then married and family life can show that dynamic and healthy complementarity that contributes to the growth and maturing of spouses and children. Heterosexuality being essential to marriage in its natural character, the most successful marriages tend to be those where the husband is most masculine and the wife most feminine.
People are often attracted to one another precisely because of differences of personality; and many successful marriages are in fact based on the vigorous effort of the parties to harmonise their divergent characters - a process usually marked by conflicts and reconciliations. Such marriages could easily have failed had the parties made less energetic efforts at achieving understanding; their free will was after all constantly in play. Reaching an agreement is always possible; but not without strong and persistent exercise of personal freedom on the part of each.
Jane Austen has one of her characters suggest that differences of makeup between the spouses tend to favor their happiness: "it is rather a favorable circumstance. I am perfectly persuaded that the tempers had better be unlike... Some opposition here is friendly to matrimonial happiness" [13]. While it is not always so, human experience does show that many highly successful marriages are between two persons of quite contrasting characters.
It does not seem that marriage and conjugal life should be directed according to democratic procedures; but rather according to a corporative model, and even better, as a communion of love. Marriage does not offer a quorum for the operation of democracy. Three is the least number needed to be able to decide by majority vote. When there are just two, the only way of proceeding is consensus or disagreement. To learn to agree, to reach a "con-sensus", is part of the conjugal process of learning to live and love together. Two wills, each determined to have its way, can never keep mere friendship going, let alone marriage. The characteristic affirmation of love - "I want whatever he or she wants" - is easier said than lived in practice. But people who give up trying to say it, no longer have the approach that distinguishes friendship or marriage and have, at least at that moment, ceased to love.

Notes
[1] Julián Marías: La Felicità Umana: un impossibile necessario, 1990, p. 318.
[2] which has not been altogether without expression, from Monostikoi's "Marriage is an evil that most men welcome", to Arthur Schopenhauer's, "To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties".
[3] The Cocktail Party, Act 2.
[4] Wojtyla, K.: Love and Responsibility, p. 88.
[5] In more traditional terms, the three augustinian "bona" or goods. cf. two canonical articles of mine: "Personalism and the bona of Marriage" (Studia canonica 27 (1993), 401-412); "Personalism and the traditional goods of marriage" (Apollinaris, 70 (1997) 305-314).
[6] John Paul II, Homily in Washington, D.C. Oct. 7, 1979.
[7] Prenuptial agreements determining how the property should be divided in case of a divorce are not uncommon today. This is to commence with an undermined marriage, built on an initial lack of trust.
[8] Charles Dickens: David Copperfield, Ch. 44.
[9] John Paul II: Letter to Families, 1994, n. 7.
[10] cf. C. Burke: Covenanted Happiness..., ch. 8.
[11] Pleasure is not the meaning but, at most, a complement of the act.
[12] "Consortium" is often used in canonical literature to describe the married covenant or union. Its etymology [con-sors = "shared destiny"] is particularly fitting.
[13] Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 4.