feeling and duty, passion and promise.

But married people make each other practice saving, investment, and delayed gratification. Nothing can mature character like marriage.

It is the illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.

who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered—living life incurvatus in se.41 As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love . . . ?”

The Overly Subjective View of Love

As author Denis de Rougemont said, “Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love . . . ?”

Many people believe that if you have sex with your spouse just to please him or her though you are not interested in sex yourself, it would be inauthentic or even oppressive. This is the thoroughly subjective understanding of love-as-passionate-feeling. And often this quickly leads into a vicious cycle. If you won’t make love unless you are in a ro

Kierkegaard writes of three possible outlooks on life—what he calls the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. He says that all of us are born aesthetes, and we only can become ethical or religious through our choices. So what is the aesthete? The aesthete doesn’t really ask whether something is good or bad but only whether it is interesting.13

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage—namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people