Recently, I received a great lesson, perhaps the most important, regarding marriage.

I was speaking with a woman married to a man with Asperger’s syndrome. Diagnosed after marriage, she told me about the difficulty of being married to a person who cannot show affection, nor to perceive others’ need for it.

When I asked her if she was receiving psychological support, she said yes, but it doesn’t seem to be very effective. The psychologist wanted to guide her according to the prevailing individualism: “But if you can’t be happy, why do you want to stay married?”

This mother’s response was incontestable: “Because I love him.”

The purpose of marriage is to love.

The purpose of life is to love.

Happiness is that chimera that clouds the compass of our life.

Our human nature imposes on us the two most basic needs, even more than eating and drinking (this isn’t the place to illustrate this idea, but there are many examples that demonstrate it), our greatest needs are to feel loved and to love.

Children don’t always make us happy, but they are always offering us the opportunity to develop our capacity to love—and it’s a shame how many parents miss this opportunity.

Even when children don’t always make us happy, we don’t disown them (unless we are emotionally or psychologically unbalanced).

Whenever I think of demonstrations of love, I think of José María, who, living as an only child—his brother had died at a young age—when his mother was confined to a wheelchair for many years and then to a bed due to Alzheimer’s, he personally dedicated himself to providing her with all the necessary care, even sleeping with her during that time, instead of hiring a nurse (having the financial means to do so). If we had asked him then, “Are you happy taking care of your mother?” I think it would have been perfectly understandable if he had answered with an outburst.

It’s not a question of whether “I am happy,” but of whether I love or not, and how and to what extent I give myself to it.

One of the best examples of the idealization of happiness is in the much-repeated Declaration of Independence of the United States of America: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

There is no reference to the inalienable need to be loved and to love, and instead, it expresses as a right the pursuit of that emotion that centers you in yourself—because the feeling of happiness is individual—and makes you forget about the other, who can only satisfy their most basic need by being loved by you, and that allows you to achieve the meaning of your life, which is to love.

Too many people get married to the desire to be happy, but they don’t fully consider that the success of their union depends on their owning up to their decision to love. Thus, as soon as they stop feeling happy (and being an emotion, happiness is ephemeral), they consider that marriage has ceased to fulfill its purpose and, therefore, they have the “inalienable right” to seek their “treasure,” even though the pursuit of their happiness, because it goes against their need to love, goes against their very essence and, of course, they do so at the expense of their spouse’s, and certainly their children’s, primary need to feel loved

As long as human beings continue to prioritize happiness and set aside their need to love, divorces will not stop increasing, nor will sales of antianxiety and antidepressant medications decrease.

Love is synonymous with surrender, and surrendering oneself requires understanding that my happiness is absolutely secondary.

It’s true that feeling loved is just as necessary as loving. And the more emotionally immature a person is, the greater their need for attention, confusing it with love. Because of this, they easily seek, sometimes to the point of submission, displays of recognition that are nothing more than poor substitutes for true affection.

The need to receive “likes” or to have many followers on their social media, the need for you to listen to everything they have to tell you about themselves, the need for you to show admiration for their achievements or possessions, the need to be able to feel a little envy… all of these are signs that they’ve become hooked in the emotional stage between two and three years old, with their insistent “Mom look, Mom look, Mom look.

The conviction that “my time,” “my work,” “my leisure time,” “my goals,” “my desires,” “my rest,” etc., are above the commitment I made to love you—that is, to give myself to you—is a clear sign of a fixation in the egocentric stage typical of very young children.

Emotional immaturity often makes adults highly demanding of those around them, demanding from others displays of affection that they themselves are incapable of giving.

Sigmund Freud said that “He who loves becomes humble. Those who love, so to speak, renounce a part of their narcissism.”

Rather, I would point out that if you don’t become humble, if you don’t renounce as much of your narcissism as possible, your capacity to love anyone other than yourself is very small, and it’s not difficult to find people who believe they love a lot because of how much they demand to be loved.

On the contrary, when a person is emotionally mature, they are capable of perceiving the needs of others and, at least, finding a way to try to satisfy them.

And when, while married, we focus our efforts on loving our spouse—that is, on giving up our time, relegating our desires, even our needs, to satisfy the desires of the other, and stop seeking our own happiness—it is then that we find meaning in our lives, the fullness of life, which may not bring an emotion, happiness, but something much greater, something close to infinity: the joy and peace of knowing for whom we live, why we live: “Because I love him.”

ADDENUM

Christ did not come down to earth to be happy. If that had been his goal, his failure would have been enormous.

Christ came to earth to love—to give Himself—to us and for us, and to teach us how to love: “I give you a new commandment: that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” John 13:34. And more than two thousand years later, we continue to see His success in those who truly keep His Word.

The problem is that we insist on “loving” in our own way, seeking “happiness,” without giving ourselves and without accepting the cross.