Augustina's World.

I noticed this very moving comment over at Dalrock's yesterday on the subject of whether or not romantic love must precede commitment. 

I will wade in here, late, but hopefully I have something to add to the discussion. This is a subject that I know about from personal experience, as well as observing other women in similar circumstances to mine. So let me tell you a bit of my story. I am specifically responding to Deti and others who think that romantic love must proceed before a woman will remain devoted to her weakened husband.

I have never had romantic feelings for my husband. There was no falling in love period before we decided to get married. He asked me to marry him in a letter. We spoke over the phone a few times (he lived in a distant state), and I agreed to it. We were both socially conservative and I wanted a large family where I stayed at home and homeschooled the kids. This is also what he wanted, so I went for it. I never liked the dating scene and didn’t want to deal with it any more.

I agreed to marry him before I even met him. There were no tingles, no attraction, no romance. I went live near him and we spent a few weeks together before we got married. He was on the short side and slightly built. As far as sexual attraction goes, I would say it was neutral for me. He did not repulse me, but he didn’t make me tingle either.

Our wedding night wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t that great. As I said, neutral. I could work up a desire for him but it wasn’t there naturally. Immediately, our young marriage hit rocky shoals, because that’s just life. I immediately got pregnant and had difficult pregnancies which did nothing to help our sex life. He lost his job. We moved several times, across the country and in three different states. We ended up living with my parents. This did nothing to raise his sexual attractiveness to me. Hypergamy? What hypergamy?

Flash forward fifteen years or so. I had finally had it. I wanted to be the good Christian wife, and be submissive to my husband. But there was nothing to submit to. He didn’t lead. He drifted. It was like being on a ship, but with no captain to guide it. And the waters are full of icebergs, rocky shoals, submerged reefs, and vast stretches of the doldrums. It was terrifying to have my now large family on a ship with no one to navigate these waters.

He was passive, hesitant, didn’t lead as a father should, couldn’t discipline the children, and still couldn’t support his family. I was forced to make every decision, to consider our options with no input from him. I would wait for his input, request his input, but never got it. 

I can attest that a passive man who doesn’t lead will invite the fury of his woman. I was angry, furious, confused and resentful. He was, in addition to his passivity, also cold and difficult to reach. When I had tragic losses all I asked for was for him to hold me. He couldn’t do it. He could not comfort me. He also had a host of strange behavior, that I tried at first to pass off as eccentric. In short, he failed me in every way imaginable.

Finally, when I could take it no more, I considered divorce. I just wanted to be free of the emotional turmoil and unrelenting disappointment and resentment I felt towards him. But I did not consider divorce for long. I asked myself, what would it be like, to be free of him? And then I got a vision. There was my husband, sad, small and alone, in a dingy flat above a Laundromat, eating a bowl of ramen noodles. I knew that’s what divorce would do to him. And I couldn’t do it. I could not deprive this man of his family.

For all his faults, and they were legion, I knew all he wanted was a loving home for him and his children. I could not take that away from him. To do so would be bad, evil, disgusting, horrible and nasty. Marriage is fundamentally about trust. You make yourself vulnerable to the other person. You trust that they will stick by you, even if you are imperfect. I could not violate that trust, even if he didn’t live up to expectations. To violate that trust is evil. It is akin to murder.

So I dismissed the idea of divorce. Instead, I accepted my situation. I was forced, unwillingly, to be the leader of my family. I could not understand why. I did not want it, I was dragged to it, kicking and screaming (often quite literally). He didn’t ask me to be the leader, he just didn’t lead. So I looked for a career and went back to school and started working.

Once I accepted my situation, my attitude improved. I was less angry, less depressed, and more at peace. Not entirely, and this took a long time, but I felt noticeably better. It was only a few months after this that the full understanding of my situation came about. My husband’s brother was diagnosed with probably Huntington’s Disease. My husband was eventually diagnosed as well. 

This explained so much. Huntington’s is a neurodegenerative disease that affects all aspects of a person’s life: motor, cognitive and psychiatric. I would say all of our problems stemmed from the early symptoms of the disease. One of the hallmarks is loss of executive function. A man cannot lead a family without executive function. Poor executive function means no ability to make decisions, to initiate activities, to plan even in the short term. 

So what kept me loyal to him? A previous romantic attraction, that I could hold to? No. That was true of my SIL with her husband, but not for me. Hypergamy? My husband was not ever powerful, and never made much money. We were poor and dependent of family support through much of our marriage. I often felt embarrassed by his behavior. 

I don’t get much out of my marriage. For all intents and purposes I am like a single mother, and I often wish I had romance in my life. I have never had romantic love, and doubt that I will ever experience it in my life. 

Perhaps I am devoted to a higher cause: my family. I have devotion to him, and fondness for him. I recognize now what a struggle it was for him and that he is not at fault for his ‘failings.’ But it is not based on ‘tingles’, attraction, previous romantic feelings or any other such thing. I took vows to love and honor him, in good times and bad and in sickness and in health. So be it.

Now Dalrock, you don’t know me, so feel free to edit my overly long post. I am not in the habit of baring my personal life on the internet, but as it pertains to your post, I thought I had something to add. In short: romantic love or sexual attraction are not necessary prerequisites to devotion to a weakened and ailing husband.

It the God of Biomechanics had a prophet, it would be Roissy, but his chronicler would be Michel Houellebecq. The power in  Houellebecq's novels lay in their ability to describe individual atomisation whilst in a crowd. Loneliness is the ever present undercurrent, and though his characters may form relationships, there is a realisation that once they are old, ugly or otherwise "inconvenient," the relationships will fail.  His characters only "love" contingent on the other having "something"; be that looks, money or fame. Once that "something is gone", so goes the "love". Lana del Ray's current song speaks about this angst. It's an ode to Roissy. All love is fleeting.

Hence the power of Game. Game is, simply,  cultivating that "something" which women will find attractive. It is the recognition for the need and the accumulation of erotic capital. But here is the kicker; time, entropy and the process of aging are in opposition to the hoard, hence, all of us will get old, ugly and undesirable. Thus the obsession with staying attractive and avoiding old age. In the sexual market place without erotic capital, the god of sexual biomechanics kicks in and we are all alone.

But contrast this with Augustina's type of "love". Here, there is minimal or no attraction, even repulsion at times, yet it still sticks with the other.  

I don’t get much out of my marriage. For all intents and purposes I am like a single mother, and I often wish I had romance in my life. I have never had romantic love, and doubt that I will ever experience it in my life. 

Perhaps I am devoted to a higher cause: my family. I have devotion to him, and fondness for him. I recognize now what a struggle it was for him and that he is not at fault for his ‘failings.’ But it is not based on ‘tingles’, attraction, previous romantic feelings or any other such thing. I took vows to love and honor him, in good times and bad and in sickness and in health. So be it.

This type of love is outside the jurisdiction of the God of Biomechanics, it's a different type of love altogether, and it is this type of love that is the basis of Christian marriage. People may stick together out of habit, social pressure, convenience and whatever other utility, but what makes them stay when there is nothing in it for them at all?

Augustina understanding of her motivations leads her to describe it as a kind of duty to her husband, but it is not a duty. When contemplating his potential plight, should she leave him, she is moved to pity. It's not duty that stopped her from leaving her husband but rather a desire not to do wrong by him, not to see him suffer. Whilst she is not attracted to her husband she still cannot do evil to him and it is this inability to be bad which is the basis of her love and provides sustenance to her marriage.

Good and Evil are moral polarities which are expressed through our actions. Augustina's marriage is sustained by her possessing a moral polarity of good, thereby stopping her from harming the marriage and her husband. Her actions are not based on rational calculation but on moral nature. She has no self interested reason to stay but she cannot be bad to the marriage. She possess Caritas.

From the wiki article.

The love that is caritas is distinguished by its origin, being divinely infused into the soul, and by its residing in the will rather than emotions, regardless of what emotions it stirs up. 

Executive summary: Possessing Caritas means being good despite of what you feel.

It's this type of love which keeps the marriage going when there is no reason for it to keep going any longer: It's the love that lasts. It is also the main reason why marriages break up today. Most people lack the moral polarity of goodness that Augustina has and thereby divorce. As the prophets would have said, we have become evil and are now suffering the consequences for it.( Note, I'm not retarded. The culpability attributable to divorce is contingent on particular circumstances.)

Aquinas understood Caritas as a type of friendship towards God and Man. Personally, and I know I'm on very shaky ground here, I think Aquinas' conception of it was limited. I would go further than he does and assert that Caritas, expressed in act, perfects all things.(Including marriages which would otherwise fail.) Caritas should not just to be thought of as a friendship towards God and Man but extending to all things, including the physical and animal world. It is the foundation from which all good things come. A man (or woman) in possession of Caritas has some of the "stuff of God" in him and thereby becomes sort of "related by substance" to Him and, as a result, assumes a limited God-like nature. Augustina God-Loves here husband whist most other women flesh-Love theirs.

Now I harp on about Caritas (no one else seems to in this corner of the blogosphere) because the lack of Cartitas is THE fundamental problem ailing the West. Caritas makes you stick at it when the everything is bleak. We divorce, because we find our partners unattractive and thus screw them over. We let the Left win because we feel like lounging poolside. We allowed ourselves to be silenced by PC because we're scared of what other people may think of us. But look at the early Christians. They were flogged, tortured and fed to the animals, but they would not renounce the faith or do evil. They were full of Caritas, we are full of shit.

We've rejected God's nature and have reverted back to our default Pagan mode--look about you--except this time, with far less discipline than in the early stages of Ancient Rome or Greece.  We all know how Rome and Greece ended up.

........................

As an aside, and pertinent to my recent posts on the role of language and conceptual development/retardation, the wiki article also notes the danger of conception failure due to the non specificity of the word "love"; 

Confusion can arise from the multiple meanings of the English word "love". The love that is caritas is distinguished by its origin, being divinely infused into the soul, and by its residing in the will rather than emotions, regardless of what emotions it stirs up.

and;

Note that the King James Version uses both the words charity and love to translate the idea of caritas / ἀγάπη: sometimes it uses one, then sometimes the other, for the same concept. Most other English translations, both before and since, do not; instead throughout they use the same more direct English word love, so that the unity of the teaching should not be in doubt. Love can have other meanings in English, but as used in the New Testament it almost always refers to the virtue of caritas.

Rigorous minds, aware of the distinction will appreciate the contextual difference in meaning but weak minds, some in places of high authority will not. The Biblical meaning of love is quite specific to Caritas. I honestly wonder why English translators of the Bible did translate the word as Caritas and avoid confusion of meaning rather than using the word "love" which opens up the Bible to "Eat, Pray, Love" types of interpretations.

Deus Caritas est is translated in English to God is Love, but since love can have so many different meanings in the English language this translation is wide open to abuse. Since Caritas is a specific type of love with no equivalent English word, the translation, no matter how stylistically awkward, should be God is Caritas.  It's just another example of how limitations in language can sytmie concept development and further the development of bad thought.