Do Feelings Matter When Choosing a Spouse?

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The title of this post might seem a bit weird to you, but it also might be a question you’ve found yourself pondering in one form or another throughout your adult life. Personally I started asking it more and more as I transitioned into the “real world” from a blissful childhood of Disney movies.

Through the eyes of a kid, love was just an emotion, a warm romantic feeling that I knew some people had for each other. The man thought the woman was pretty. The woman thought the man was handsome. They both felt nervous around each other, and once they fell in love they stayed in love. There was no controlling these feelings, predicting them, or developing them.

Falling in love just happened. It wasn’t rational; it was magical.

Admit it! You thought the same thing.

Eventually, this is squeezed out of us though. Lectures on the real nature of love, the fleetingness of emotion, and the difficulties of marriage pull us away from belief in fairy tale romance. A couple breakups of our own become nails in the coffin, and soon we’re left with a much more rigid outlook on romance in general. We come to realize that emotion can lead you the wrong way, and some people simply aren’t good for each other.

Our belief in love as an infallible emotion is replaced with the idea of logical compatibility. We no longer find a partner based on what our emotions tell us. Instead we analyze a person’s personality traits, beliefs, and mannerisms in hopes of logically determining that he/she is a “good match.”

Relationships are work. Love is scientific. The magical emotions are mere hormones to be ignored.

This is the common narrative among the “realistic” people of the world, but I hate it, and by-golly I think I’ll take an intellectual stand against it! It is an idea that leads many young people to see emotion as a purely negative thing, and this feeds into some big problems. To avoid these problems I want people to start listening to their emotions again as they navigate the dating world.

On the other hand...

I admit that many people in our secular culture put too much stock in emotion. They choose a partner and maintain a relationship based entirely upon nervous butterflies and youthful romance. As many will be quick to point out, these things always fade, and so we have high divorce rates and confused teenagers. Okay. Acknowledged. Let’s not do that.

But perhaps we can strike some kind of balance between blindly following emotion and logically scrutinizing each potential partner. I think this might be worth pursuing because, just like emotion, reason also can’t be fully trusted when it comes to love.

People are complicated! Each human being is an ever-changing cluster of intricate personality traits, interests, body, spirit, and intellect. All the different possibilities for hobbies, aspirations, social quirks, sense of humor, talents, and dozens of other attributes make logically choosing a “good match” a near-impossible task. We don’t even understand our own selves all that well! If we try to rationally analyze each potential partner, we can encounter a couple of problems.

How do you really know who's perfect for you?

First, we might not be able to see right through them all that well. Sometimes you need to start dating someone to find out who they really are. We may accidentally write-off our future spouse because we never actually got to know them! The second problem is that we may not know which traits are actually the ones that mesh well with our own. Some people say opposites attract, but others will argue that a good match is made from mutual interests and similar thought patterns.

Especially when it comes to online dating this holds true. It is easy to read a profile and understand the on-paper version of someone, but most of the time you can’t really know if he or she will work for you until you really meet face to face. The thing we call “chemistry” is too much to balance and navigate effectively with our brains alone. If you wait for what you reason to be the perfect match, you might end up realizing that you didn’t know who your perfect match really was or that she never existed at all!

Another reason you should listen more to your emotions is that they are naturally good. God gave us hormones and emotions and attractions for a reason: they are designed in part to draw us toward a future spouse. It is true that our fallen nature can throw them off target, but that only means we should be cautious with them, not discount them altogether. When properly controlled, they help cultivate a relationship in the best way, and they lead us to genuine love. They don’t only help us in an already established relationship, they help us find one in the first place too!

Go with your gut.

Many well-married Catholics I know simply bumped into each other one day and their relationship just sort of took off before they even had the chance to give it much thought. They began dating not because they ran each other through scientific compatibility tests. They began dating because they wanted to. They liked each other. They trusted a gut feeling and it led to faithful marriage. Good emotions are good indicators!

So what’s the point? Whether you bump into Catholics in real life, or online, stop waiting around for the perfect match. Ask that cute girl out, even though you think there’s a chance she isn’t your type. Stop ignoring the guy who isn’t quite perfect, and get to know the other side of him you haven’t yet seen.

Stop waiting for your spouse and start looking for your spouse! Regard positive emotions as a blip on the radar. A strong emotional draw can be a good indicator of important “chemistry.” Sometimes two people nobody ever thought would make a good couple end up having the most complete relationship of all! Finally, stop banging yourself on the head for falling in love when you can’t fully rationalize it.

Please use your brain, but go ahead and use your heart too.

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