Why then cannot love
sanctify passionate relationships outside marriage? Why should the
union of true lovers be held to be impure before marriage and pure
after it?
Let me answer the last query first. I do not think the union of true
lovers apart from marriage is impure. I believe that such lovers make a
very serious mistake--a mistake that may turn out to have been cruel. I
believe that society is utterly right in condemning such unions, and
that those who really understand will always refuse to enter on them.
But impure is not the word to apply to them. They are clean and
beautiful compared to the bodily intimacies of those who marry without
love. And yet I do not think that even emotionally they can ever be
perfect. Sexual intimacy is not the perfect and sacramental thing which
it is meant to be unless both parties come to it with free and
untroubled minds, feeling that what they do is a right and happy thing.
But in the unions of unmarried persons there generally lurks some
half-hidden sense of shame. Some part of the being of one or the other
really endorses society's standards, and even love cannot dispel the
shadows thus created.
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