He had lived alone all his adult life, in a vacuum. He had contributed to the sum of human knowledge; that was his vocation, it was the way he had found to express his talents; but love was something he had never known.
Atomised
Michel Houellebecq
Category: MARRIAGE
-
“My parents were never happy together…” he continued, and this second observation was even worse. It seemed to deny his existence, to deprive him of a certain right to life. He was the fruit of an unhappy, mismatched union, something that would have been better if it had never been.
Platform
Michel Houellebecq -
(8) Why are Some People Unable to Enjoy
Purity?- Family Decomposition and Breakdown:
The young man or woman looks for the lost love in the family in whomever he/she meets and with any possible means, even if that will cost him his eternity! Familial love and awareness builds sound family relations with the children; and thus enables them to find joy in making an open discussion with their parents –or at least one of
them- to grow properly into adolescence, and to become deeper with time.
Purity
Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty - Family Decomposition and Breakdown:
-
Whoever is chaste before marriage is the same after marriage. Those who learned adultery before marriage, do the same afterwards. It is written in the Divine Scriptures “All bread is sweet to the adulterer” (Sirach 23:17). For this reason, a crown is placed on the head (in the altar), as a sign of victory. They are entering the wedding not conquered or oppressed by lust. There is no reason to put a crown on the head of whoever gets into the love of pleasures and surrenders his soul to adultery, because he has been defeated.Instill this in them, teach and pressure them by all means.
—St. John Chrysostom
via Family Love by Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty -
There is something pleasing and salutary in someone’s having had ill-luck in his first love, when he has come to know its pain but still kept true to his love, still kept faith in this first love; there is something nice about it when, in the course of years, he sometimes now recalls it quite vividly, and although his soul has been sound enough to, so to speak, take leave of that kind of life in order to dedicate itself to something higher, there is something pleasing about his then remembering it sadly as something that may have fallen short of perfection but was very beautiful none the less.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
Every estate has its traitors, so too matrimony. Naturally I do not mean the seducers, for of course they have not entered into this holy estate (I trust the mood this inquiry meets you in doesn’t cause you to smile at that expression); I do not mean those who have left it through divorce, for they have at least had the courage to be openly rebellious. No, I mean those who are rebels only in thought, who do not even dare let it be expressed in action, these wretched husbands who sit and sigh over the fact that love has long ago evaporated from their marriage, these husbands who, as you once said of them, sit like lunatics each in his matrimonial cell, and tug at the iron bars and fantasize about the sweetness of betrothal and the bitterness of marriage, these husbands who, as you rightly observe, are among those to con-gratulate, with a certain malicious glee, anyone who gets engaged. I cannot describe how despicable they appear to me, and how much unholy joy it gives me when such a husband confides in you and pours out all his sufferings, rattling off all his lies about the happy first love, and you say with a knowing look, ‘Yes, I’ll make sure not to get onto thin ice’, and he is all the more embittered that he can’t drag you with him into a common shipwreck. It is these husbands you so often refer to when you speak of a tender paterfamilias with four blessed children he would sooner see in hell.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
