Integrating Love: Love and Responsibility Series (Post #11)

Integrating Love
In this section of Love and Responsibility, the future pope (St. John Paul II) identifies a challenge that is before a man and a woman who seek love: The Problem of Integrating Love.

So far, Wojtyla’s psychological analysis of love has been of sensual or sentimental reactions of a man for a woman and vice versa. In this section, he notes that all these reactions are “strictly individual”[1]—every person and every relationship is different. Love is always “unique and unreproducible,”[2] because it is personal. It has an inner dimension and an outer dimension; it is a drama of “great and absorbing importance”[3] in the lives of the two persons involved. Love between a man and a woman can make other experiences pale in comparison and may reveal parts of the self that the person didn’t even know were there. Love has great psychological power.

Truth and Freedom Integrate Love
Psychology itself, though, confirms that feelings are not enough to sustain love. Two characteristics of a person’s inner life that must enter into the relationship are truth and freedom. These help to “integrate” the couple’s love—to make it the kind of love that thrives in marriage.

Wojtyla comes back, then, to the choice of the will based on knowledge of the other. “The value of the person is closely bound up with freedom, and freedom is a property of the will.”[5] As previously discussed, the commitment of the will to the other person’s good is decisive in true love. Love must be a free choice; one that is unconditional, and this kind of love cannot be promised without knowledge: “A really free commitment of the will is possible only on the basis of truth,” Wojtyla writes. The truth cannot be only the psychological truth (i.e. “We really feel in love with one another”) but also the objective truth that these two are good for one another. This objective, ethical side of love is Wojtyla’s next subject.

[1] Ibid, p. 115.

[2] Wojtyla, Karol. Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 114.

[3] Ibid, p. 114.

[4] Ibid, p. 116.

[5] Ibid, p. 117.

3 responses to “Integrating Love: Love and Responsibility Series (Post #11)”

1. Sandy says:

   September 25, 2017 at 5:13 am

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2. satish says:

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3. Teentoy says:

   July 28, 2021 at 3:19 am

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