The Folly of Love Out of Bounds

I HAVE meditated on the ethics on this kind of love. Now I shall consider a few examples of its consequences to convince myself of the right attitude if by chance I still need convincing.

Countess Potochka relates in her memoires that during the occupation of Poland by Napoleon she paid too much attention to a young French officer.

Her words are interesting. “Faithful to my duties, I would not even consider the possibility of a sentiment that I should have avoided and I contented myself with denying the danger.” How many in similar circumstances do just that!

“It seemed permissible to me,” she continues, “to entertain friendship for a man who possessed all the qualities one would have desired in a brother.”

She emphasizes the next point, and it is a current delusion. “I forgot—and this was the greatest of my wrongs—that a young wife ought not to have any other confidant, any other friend than her husband. But then, why did not my husband make me remember it?”

If women can profit by meditating on the whole text, men ought to memorize the last line of it. It is unfortunately only too true that the infidelities of many wives have as their explanation, let us not say excuse, an initial fault on the part of the husband. Likewise the failings of many husbands in regard to marital fidelity have been prepared for at least by the bungling of their wives. Some men and some women try to justify their conduct on the basis of their particular situation.

“We are no longer in the ordinary conditions of marriage. We live fraternally and are consequently more free in our interior life since we have found through experience that a union of souls between us is not possible. . .”

There is only one answer to such a statement. Even when by mutual consent, because of a lack of soul-union, husbands and wives live without practicing bodily union, they still have no right to infidelity of the heart. Such infidelity, in addition to being against God’s law is opposed to the divine institution of the family.

I saw in the preceding meditation how it is against the law of God. How is it against the divine institution of the family?

The family is a couple and not an assembly of three persons. “They shall be two in one flesh.”

To yield themselves to a passionate love outside of marriage can only augment and accentuate the distance between the husband and wife and introduce an element of damnable licentiousness. And if this new love does not satisfy you, will you have recourse to a third, a fourth? Where will you stop?

Throw away your novel and start living your duty! It is austere perhaps, but it brings its reward with it. Never will an upright soul find peace and happiness in a love that his conscience condemns, that it cannot do otherwise than condemn.