Reflections on Love Within Marriage by Maria Tobolova

Artist: Daniel Gerhartz   

What therefore God hath joined together,
let not man put asunder (Matthew 19:6).

The word “love” has several meanings. We say: “I love God,” “I love Russia,” but then we also say, “I love bologna.” In ancient Greek, the highest form of love was referred to as “agape;” the word “philia” meant friendship, while the word “eros” meant the feeling between a man and a woman. We will talk here about the latter word, “eros.”

Marriage is the voluntary act of every person, the manifestation of his free will

After creating the first man Adam, God said: It is not good that the man should be alone (Genesis 2:18)—and created the first woman from Adam’s rib. Man and woman were made to complement each other, and their marriage was meant to be once and forever. God blessed the union of the first-created people in Paradise and told them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it (Genesis 2:28). A Christian marriage is the union of loving hearts; it is the mystery of bringing together two people on spiritual, emotional, and physical levels sanctified by the Lord Himself:

Shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh (Matthew 19:5-6)

Matrimony blessed by the Most High bestows the fullness of life and joy.

Love is the feeling of heavenly origin, for God is love (1 John 4:8). Love is a lofty, pure, and beautiful feeling that people have cherished and glorified since the earliest times. We find many examples of the glorification of love in the Bible. “The Song of Songs” is the triumphant hymn of love between people that has become a reflection of Heavenly love. Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her… (Proverbs 31:10–12). The Apostle Paul likens a Christian family to Christ and the Church. In ancient Rome there was the following saying: “Love conquers all things” (“Omnio vincit amor!”).

In the system of Orthodox values, it is love that brings man closer to God: the triumph of perfect love of man leads to divine love Since the earliest times, the orientation of spiritual and moral values was identified in Rus’ with the truth of God. In old times, the Russian people viewed marriage as a sacred event. In peasant families, as soon as a girl was born, her parents would start collecting a dowry, knowing that the time would come when their daughter would get married and have a family of her own. A dowry сhest was to be filled with bed linen, towels, and tablecloths woven and embroidered during the long winter evenings. The girls wouldn’t just marry for love, but by the choice of their parents, and although it may sound unbelievable to modern times, such families often lived long and happily. The couples would undoubtedly have church weddings asking for God’s blessing on their future family life and the birth of healthy children.

“It is great that Christ Himself is present at marriage because where Christ is virtue is acquired and water turns into wine,” says the Holy Hierarch Gregory the Theologian.

By sanctifying the Mystery of Holy Matrimony, the Lord invisibly offers the married couple His all-powerful protection from life’s troubles and from wickedness of the devil who tries to destroy love between people.

In ancient Rus, the verbs “to love” and “to take pity” were synonyms

In marriage, everything is sanctified: labor for the sake of providing for the family, household cares, and the spouses’ loving caresses. In Christian marriage, everything is done in the name of love that never diminishes but increases with the years, because love and harmony prevail in the family, as well as mutual understanding and submission to one another, and all issues are resolved together. By praying together, the married couple grows even more dear to one another. True love is inconceivable without compassion, readiness to serve your loved one, and the willingness to bear each other’s weaknesses. No wonder that in ancient Rus’ the verbs “to love” and “to take pity” were synonymous. Blessed is he whose home becomes a small church under the protection of the Almighty Creator.

Husband and wife in Holy Rus’ knew how to protect mutual love. Whenever the loving couple faced separation—for example, when a husband had to go to battle— his wife prayed to God to protect her husband in all the ways of his life. In foreign lands, he felt stronger knowing that back home, his faithful, kind and loving wife was praying for him. They never knew boredom or satiety—they didn’t even have time for that. The head of the household had to provide for the family, while his wife was to keep family hearth warm and bring up the children. We find fine examples of marital love and faithfulness in the lives of Sts. Andronicus and Athanasia, Holy Prince Peter and Princess Fevronia of Murom, Kirill and Maria the parents of St. Sergius of Radonezh, and others.

The married couple is required to live in chastity and not break the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” According to the word of the Apostle, Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled (Hebrews 13:4). Also, the Holy Hierarch John Chrysostom admonishes, “May the wife be most precious to her husband, and his wife must be the most obliging of all.” Faithfulness to duty, including marital duty, has always been natural to the Russian people. The simple Russian people, possessing strong family traditions, steadfastly adhering to the norms of Orthodoxy and the commandments of Christ, always condemned adultery. In old times, people couldn’t even dream of divorce. Divorce was possible only among the wealthy elite, but even these scandalous events were rare and subject to public condemnation.

Love and duty are opposites in human nature, and in the conflict between marital duty and love, Russian writers would always took the side of the duty, condemning premarital liaisons and adultery. Let us recall the tragic death of the heroine of “Poor Liza” by N.M. Karamzin, Anna Karenina in the eponymous novel by Leo Tolstoy, or Katerina in the drama, “Thunderstorm,” by Ostrovsky. A.S. Pushkin called Tatiana Larina his “sweet ideal” for her moral purity, aversion to fashionable liaisons, and faithfulness to her marital duty that triumphed over her powerful feeling towards Onegin. Tatiana’s inability to cheat, to make a deal with her conscience, her unwillingness to insult her husband by improper conduct—that’s what should become an attractive example for today’s youth.

Speaking of Tatiana Larina, F.M. Dostoyevsky asserted:

“We can even state the following: This positive type of a Russian woman of such beauty has practically never been repeated in our belle-lettres, except maybe in the image of Liza Kalitina in ‘A Nest of Nobles’ by Turgenev.”

The author writes about his Liza: “God alone she loved with rapture, timidly, tenderly.” For Liza, the meaning of life was in self-sacrifice with the aim of becoming closer to God, to embody the moral ideals of Christianity. After learning that the wife of her beloved, thought to be dead, was about to arrive, Liza, with her Christian meekness, submitted to her fate and appealed to Lavretsky to act likewise: “It remains for both of us to do our duty. You, Feodor Ivanitch, ought to be reconciled to your wife.” She sacrifices her personal happiness and enters a monastery to dedicate her life to the service of Him Whom she loved so devotedly from early childhood. She renounced all the comforts of this world for the sake of love for the Most High God. The image of Liza Kalitina is the Orthodox religious-moral ideal, the ideal of self-sacrifice.

Family life can’t happen without temptations. There are instances when one of the spouses commits adultery. Adultery means inflicting irreparable spiritual offence upon your life partner that is not just difficult, but often impossible to forgive. The closer we get to our modern times, the more cases of adultery we observe amongst the aristocracy of the time.

Once such clear example is the family life of Emperor Alexander II. When he was young, he decided that, because of his great love for her he would marry the German princess and a future Empress Maria Alexandrovna. When his parents stood against this marriage, he announced to them that he would rather abdicate from the throne than abandon this girl. Their marriage was a happy one that lasted many years. Maria Alexandrovna bore him eight children. But at the age of forty-one, the tsar fell in love with the sixteen-year-old Ekaterina Dolgorukova. He chose not to fight against sin, but instead indulged in his unrestrained passion, thinking only about his pleasure. Four children were born of this adulterous love affair. The tsar treated his crowned spouse cruelly by letting his young mistress and their children reside in the Winter Palace. Maria Alexandrovna was dying of tuberculosis, while her husband rarely visited her, instead spending all his free time with his new “family.” It was as if the tsar was unable to understand that he was causing immeasurable suffering to his meek wife, who loved him wholeheartedly during their forty years of marriage. Maria Alexandrovna humbly endured the physical and emotional turmoil and no one ever heard a single word of reproach from her. A month after the death of his lawful spouse, the tsar, not waiting for the appropriate yearlong mourning period to end, immediately had a church wedding with Dolgorukova, thus stirring the indignation of his adult children from his first marriage. Who knows but perhaps Emperor Alexander II’s violent death at the hands of a terrorist was the divine punishment for his sin of adultery? Christian doctrine calls us to master our passions, to remain human under any circumstances by showing nobility and compassion to others.

True love is always the renunciation of egoism

In our days, young people get married because of their shared feeling of love. It is the choice they make based on free human will, when former strangers become the closest people in the whole world. A loving couple assumes that they will love each other forever and only death will part them. But lovesickness and inexperienced passion are really delicate feelings if they aren’t combined with an understanding of the sanctity of marriage and the willingness to serve one another, because true love is always a renunciation of egoism. As a rule, the fire of the family hearth burns brightly only because of the grace-filled help of God. The philosopher K.N.Leontiev wrote:

“What is a family without religion?.. Whoever wants to strengthen our family must hold dear everything related to our Church.”

In Christianity, marriage is perceived as a deed, as a test of one’s spiritual, emotional and physical strength, as hard labor in the name of the lofty goal of parenthood and raising children. Marriage can be strong because of the mutual readiness to sacrifice and submit to one another. If the spouses expect from one another nothing but carnal joy or the comforts of life, their marriage will be fragile. It can be destroyed by any trifle thing or a quarrel, or by time and weariness. Oftentimes, young spouses make truly unrealistic demands on each other, and this also weakens their union.

People marry to live together, but it also happens that both of them, especially the young girl, aren’t so used to doing household chores. In the past, a ten-year-old peasant girl could do everything: weave, make cabbage soup and porridge, wash linen and rinse it in the river, take care of her younger brothers and sisters, and even work in the fields. Today, young girlw can’t cook, no one taught them how to plan a family budget, and so the “love boat” of a young couple “runs aground” over everyday life.

It also happens that man is busy searching to change “loves” (that is, passions and lustful desires), thus spiritually breaking himself apart. Unfortunately, this results in divorce, possibly after a few years together (or sometimes in a matter of months). It turns out during the court proceedings that, according to the opinion of one of the spouses, their marriage was a mistake. During the divorce, the husband, who may have comfortably lived with his wife for twenty or thirty years, gives the following reason for the divorce at the court hearing: “We were unfit for each other.” He asserts that his marriage was the product of the impulse of inexperienced youth, an uncontrollable passion, and a mental block. This, of course, is nothing more than an excuse. In majority of cases, the real reason for such a divorce is that he has gotten a mistress who, as a rule, is a lot younger than he. So, no longer satisfied with his old wife, he ruthlessly throws her out of his life like a squeezed orange. He often doesn’t even think about the consequences of such actions. He assumes that here she is, his true second half whom he has finally found, while all the years of his previous life were a tragic mistake that he had to fix immediately. He thinks that if he misses the chance of long-lasting and eternal happiness with this new love, he’ll have lived his life in vain.

His former wife can’t understand where she did her husband wrong, how it could happen that her beloved, her loving husband, suddenly abandoned their family, both her and the children, whom he seemed to have loved so much before. The poor woman is dealt a severe emotional blow. In such instances, cruelty and betrayal cannot be justified by infatuation or a strong passion. It is a betrayal in relationship to God and your loved one.

At the same time, the young rival is convinced that she will be able to build her happiness on the misfortune of another woman. Because of her inexperience and pride, she can’t see that her beau can be as dishonorable and ruthless with her as he was with his first wife, because all passion comes to end; and besides, her beauty doesn’t last long, but withers away year after year. He will find a new love again and will decide that he has a right to be happy. But earthly happiness is truly shaky and illusory; that is why the Church calls us to love God first and foremost, because happiness is only possible in life with God. “Whoever doesn’t love God and his family loves nothing,” said St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain. Whenever the two people find solid happiness, they owe it to their patience, fidelity and mercifulness, to their ability to control their tempers and to cherish each other.

An official marriage disciplines, teaches patience, and safeguards from a rash and impulsive breakup

In modern society, a lot of people live together in common-law marriages or, in other words, they cohabit. The word “cohabitation” itself sounds almost like an offence. Cohabitation is the union of a woman with an extremely low self-esteem and a man with a low degree of responsibility. After a few years of such a “marriage,” living under the increasing stress, she will expect them to finally make their relationship official at the civil registry office, while he will avoid even the mere mention of marriage. Man’s readiness to enter into marriage speaks of his commitment and conviction that this union will last a lifetime. Official marriage provides a woman with financial security if they have children. It is important for children that their parents are not “partners” but a real family. (As a side note, children take their parents’ divorce very hard). If the relationship is strong, people get married and have a wedding. Official marriage disciplines, teaches patience, and safeguards against rash and impulsive breakup.

The current figures of divorce statistics are staggering: eighty percent of marriages end in divorce. The issue of protection of the institution of marriage is one of the utmost importance for Russia’s national security. Each person must build his life in accordance with his religious duty before God and the people, instead of “having it my way.” Clive Staples Louis (1898–1963), a British Christian thinker, warned:

“We are thus advancing toward a state of society in which… every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. And then,.. our civilization will have died at heart, and will… be swept away.”

It is an ominous word of warning to liberals of all stripes who champion “human rights,” but in fact preach all-permissiveness. Man not only has rights, but also duties before family, society and state.

The Orthodox Church teaches us to сherish as the apple of our eye the treasure of the family hearths, to preserve marital fidelity, and to raise children right. She teaches us that the love of spouses exists not only during earthly life, but transitions with us to eternity. Let us mention the great lines of the Holy Apostle Paul about eternal love:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things (1 Corinthians 13:1-7).