Intimacy without love: an illustration | Jules van Schaijik
Tags: intimacy

Katie’s recent post about intimacy without love (better read it before this one) reminds me of a passage in Jane Eyre, which beautifully illustrates her point. St. John, a zealous clergyman who also happens to be Jane Eyre’s cousin, has just asked her to be his wife and to accompany him to India to do missionary work. He frankly admits that he is not in love with her; he wants her by his side mainly because of the important role she can play in his missionary activities.

‘God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must - shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you - not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.’

Remarkably, Jane actually considers the proposal. After some serious soul searching she decides that, though it would be very hard on her and almost certainly lead to her premature death, she could go to India with St. John and serve him well (‘He will never love me; but he shall approve me’). But she cannot go as his wife. It would be wrong. About that she is both certain and adamant.

‘Consent, then, to his demand is possible: but for one item - one dreadful item. It is - that he asks me to be his wife, and has no more of a husband’s heart for me than that frowning giant of a rock… He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon, and that is all. Unmarried to him, this would never grieve me; but can I let him complete his calculations - coolly put into practice his plans - go through the wedding ceremony? Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe) and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I will never undergo it. As his sister, I might accompany him - not as his wife: I will tell him so.’

When Jane thinks of the proposed marriage as a “monstrous” martyrdom, she expresses the same truth as Vivian Gornick: that “to live without intimacy in the most intimate of circumstances is to sustain permanent damage to the spirit.” It is not a noble self-giving but a lamentable self-squandering.

Intimacy without love damages the spirit | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: intimacy

Reading a short biography of the nineteenth century American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I came across an intriguing line of argument in favor of changes in the (then) marriage laws to allow more easily for divorce.  Speaking of “English radicals of the Enlightenment,” the author, Vivian Gornick, tells us:

Among people like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and later, Robert Owen, the French Revolution had sharpened the conviction that beyond the need for political equality [between men and women] lay an equally great need to create the conditions in which the inner life could flourish.  First on the list of their demands was a radical revision of the marriage laws.  For these remarkable thinkers, marriage without intimacy—that is, the marriage commonly made without friendship or love out of economic and social considerations—was a prime villain in the matter of stunted or deformed inner lives.  They saw that, at best, such arrangements promised neutrality of feeling, and they wrote eloquently to demonstrate that neutrality of feeling is a dangerous illusion: to live without intimacy in the most intimate of circumstances is to sustain permanent damage to the spirit.  Forced by law to live in the presence of such an absence, one’s inner being closes down—is made cold, defensive, remote—and all too soon one becomes incapable of human empathy: a danger both to oneself and the world.  Goodwin and Owen became known as “sexual radicals” as a consequence of writing and speaking endlessly about the death-in-life that is marriage without friendship or love.

Setting aside the question of divorce and laws governing marriage, I find it a remarkably personalistic insight, and one that is deeply true.  The same line of thought could, I think, be used to make a compelling case against both arranged marriages and the hook-up culture prevailing in our society today.  The objective intimacy of bodily union must be matched by subjective intimacy and self-giving or it becomes positively harmful. 
But I’d love to know how it strikes others.

Intimacy and emotional dryness | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: conjugal love, emotional dryness, intimacy

A reader who listened to Bishop Sheen’s talk on marriage, linked below, sends in this question:

This is good. I wonder, however, what Archbishop Sheen would say regarding intimacy during affective dryness. Michael Healy’s [June 3rd, available at our downloads page] talk seems to indicate that only romantic love can save acts of intimacy from various perversions (or inordinacies). Doesn’t dryness imply a lack of romantic love? If so, it would seem that there should be no intimacy during dryness.

Maybe Dr. Healy or someone else could take it up.