Its been a while since I’ve written anything here–we’ve been extremely busy house hunting and on top of that, I’ve been feeling queasy and fatigued due to early pregnancy with our 3rd child. (Yes! I am about 10 weeks pregnant as I write this!) However, now that I’ve been getting some good feedback from people who are quite interested in these topics, I thought I’d take some time to get to this important aspect of what we’re talking about: attraction.
Attraction is something that is necessary for marriage today. Gone are the days of arranged Christian marriages, when families might select a mate for their children based on the economic and political advantages of the union–regardless of wether the two betrothed felt personally attracted to each other. This arrangement had its advantages. As the sagacious Professor Jospeh Cambell remarked in his classic PBS interview with Bill Moyers, there was a great deal of family love involved in arranged marriages, and that family love, more than the modern notion of ‘romantic love’ was what brought people together. Let’s not throw that notion away entirely, because the idea of family love and its altruistic aspirations is still a key part of what makes Christian marriage work today. In fact, I’d say it supersedes romantic attraction in due course. In the end, family love is all there is, and, as a precursor to the Beatific Vision, is the entire point and purpose of Christian marriage.
For the moment, though, let’s focus on the fact that without a culture of arranged marriages, we are in the position of having to cultivate attraction first, in order to bring a suitable mate into our lives, and to motivate one another to move toward marriage–at least to move beyond the first date. While there are obviously some drawbacks to this (modesty and chastity has to be all the more carefully guarded), I also think attraction is important, and learning to cultivate it is good. Natural attractions are indicators of certain biological realities that really need to be present in order to for marriage to be possible and fruitful.
Attraction has much to do with biology, but because we are not merely physical beings, attraction operates on the emotional, psychological and spiritual levels, too. All four categories have to be working somewhat in order for attraction to be present, and attraction must be present in some degree to build a stable and fruitful marriage.
As I unpack this topic, I want to focus first on the physical part, because while I think this area is obsessed-over in the secular world (always assuming a sexual relationship between partners outside of marriage), the mysteries of physical attraction are not talked about much in the Catholic world. (Barring the JPII’s Theology-of-the-Body-derived stuff out there that personally, I never really went for. I have nothing against TOB particularly. I know some traditionalists do. Maybe it just seemed too theoretical for what I really needed at the time. At any rate I seemed to have figured out a few things without getting into TOB.)
The lack of practical dating advice for adult Catholics is perhaps due to concerns over modesty, which are well-founded, but I think there is guidance to be shared about cultivating natural attractions between men and women that can be discussed appropriately. These things need to be discussed, too, because so many people are suffering from ignorance of the simple ways of nature, and without good guidance from within the family, they are turning to the world to fill the void. I would so much rather have an open and frank discussion about these realities, and thus encourage a marriage culture amongst ourselves, rather than have people go running off to “Cosmo” and Hollywood, all the other corrupting sources of information out there that are bound to cause harm.
First of all, let’s get this strait: there is a difference between seduction and attraction. Seduction is the deliberate leading of a person into sin. We can’t do it. If you notice yourself doing it (oh boy, did I struggle with this one)–stop it immediately.
If you are like me, you may need to cultivate chastity and modesty at the same time that you are learning about attraction. Seeing the difference between the two might be an important step to seeing what it is we are talking about here, and why what you have always done or believed about men and women in the past has failed to lead you to your goal of marriage and family life. Again, seduction is sinful and self-destructive. It’s about manipulating and controlling others through sexual values. If you are using seduction, even if you are not actually having sex with anyone, you will ultimately suffer from pride, fear, loneliness and alienation. You will have lust, but not love. You’ll be left with nothing, because lust drives out love.
Perhaps your main problem with dating and marriage in general has to do with confusion in this area. It certainly did for me. If, when you look at your own attitudes and behaviors honestly, you find that lust (seduction, fantasy, romantic obsession, pornography) is a serious problem for you, you may need extra help with it. Sexaholics Anonymous is 12-step fellowship and program based on AA, that has helped many people straiten out their lives in this area, and is entirely compatible with Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality.
It may be, as well, that while you don’t have much of a lust problem yourself, you have been injured by someone else’s lust problem. Perhaps that fact has distorted your thinking and perceptions, especially about men and women and everything pertaining to relations between the sexes. I also fit that category, and there is help for this problem, too. Prayer, confession, spiritual reading, holy friendships, spiritual direction, Sacraments, therapy, and 12-step recovery all helped me heal and change over time. Whether lust (yours or someone else’s) is a big problem for you, or a little one, you should at least make a good examination of conscience about these matters, take whatever sins you uncover to a priest in Confession, and receive God’s mercy and healing.
One thing that also helped me tremendously was practicing a new way of acting and thinking around the opposite sex, by going on dates. Maybe it was a form of penance; maybe it was a kind of therapy, but going on dates with men where I practiced charity and made space for natural, normal attractions to appear, actually helped me heal. Dating was where the rubber hit the road for me. I was no longer just reading and talking to a therapist and praying to have my defects removed, I was learning to act differently in real-world situations. Taking different, new and sometimes uncomfortable actions in real life eventually led me to the alter with a real human being.
To sum up, attraction, is a good, natural, God-given process that when combined with the use of reason and application of virtue, can lead to Holy Marriage. In the next few articles, I will share with you some tools I practiced to help cultivate healthy, normal attractions with the opposite sex. These are skills that, practiced with godly intentions, helped me bring out the best in the men I came into contact with (including my husband), and discover how I really felt about each of them. Practicing these habits gave me information about myself and others which was important for my discernment. It also helped me to heal my heart and express who I really am. I will also share some of the challenges I had in this area, and obstacles that my husband and I were able to overcome by the grace of God.
Grow Up and Marry! 