Love Won't Make a Relationship Last. You Need This.

“All you need is love.”

You know, John Lennon was a fine singer, but not much of a thinker.

Of all the passions, love is famously the most extravagant in its promises and the most fickle in carrying them out. This will be familiar to anyone who’s been in love, or even has dated for a time. Advice on how to maintain a happy relationship or how to remain in love makes up a good chunk of the articles here on CatholicMatch, not to mention having whole books, websites, and even training programs dedicated to it.

We all, at bottom, know that love is not enough, that falling in love will not, by itself, alter our character, that the habits we’ve had before we fall in love will remain afterwards, and that we will not, and probably shouldn’t, remain in love with someone whose society is irksome, who is unreliable, selfish, or foolish. We all know that…at least until we actually fall in love, then we start thinking the Beatles actually knew what they were talking about and end up making fools of ourselves once again.

The truth is that if we want our love to last, to turn into a fruitful and enriching relationship, in a word, if we want happiness, we need virtue.

What is virtue and why do we need it?

Virtue is not a popular subject these days. To our minds it conveys ideas of legalistic, prudish snobbery, or stiff-mannered, repressed hypocrisy, and we generally respond to talk of virtue with mockery. We then wonder why our lives and relationships are such a mess.

But virtue is not a set of legalistic rules: it is the art of living well.

The moral laws are not like the laws of a country, but more like the rules of how to operate a car. That is, they are less “do not drive on the left side of the street” than “do not drive into a telephone pole.” It is not a matter in which defiant independence is particularly helpful.

The laws of morality are the operation manual for the human machine: virtue is the quality of habitually following them within a given context. To consistently act rightly—that is, in accordance with our human nature—is to live well, and to live well is to be happy. That is what earthly happiness means, and there is no other way of achieving it.

What does virtue have to do with relationships?

This is doubly true when it comes to relationships.

When we only have ourselves to consider, we can (and many do) distract ourselves with hedonistic indulgence, with ever more novel and transgressive pleasures, or, failing that, with the bitter delights of resentment towards a world that has ‘cheated’ us and so live what seems a tolerably happy life even without virtue. But when we share our lives with someone else, when we’re responsible for not just our own but another’s happiness, it’s much harder to fake contentment.

The other person generally doesn’t let us get away with it, and, assuming she’s just as bad as we are, we get to experience the abrasive, sandpaper-like results of vice without the anesthetic of self-approval. This is one reason why so many relationships fall apart, and why they often end so acrimoniously.

Basically, to have good relationship requires good people; you can’t live well together if you don’t know how to live well in the first place, any more than you would suddenly be able to draw well just because you’re partnered with someone who doesn’t know how to draw either.

So, how do we become virtuous? What does it look like?

So, virtue is necessary for a healthy relationship. Now how do we go about acquiring it? In fact, what does it even look like?

Like all arts, in order to understand virtue, we need to start with the basics. Now, traditionally, in the West, morality has been understood to depend upon four key or ‘cardinal’ virtues: Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, and Prudence.

To these, Christianity added the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, but you have to learn to walk before you can fly, so we will be focusing on the four human virtues. This four-part division is at least as old as Plato and Aristotle, and has been agreed upon by pretty much every moral philosopher worthy of the name ever since, from Cicero to St. Thomas Aquinas to Pope Benedict XVI. It’s been the bedrock of the western system of ethics pretty much ever since men began to think systematically.

One thing it’s important to remember is that the four cardinal virtues, unlike the seven cardinal sins, are not independent: you cannot practice any one to any great degree without the others.

Some philosophers have found it helpful to think of them less as individual habits than as a single idea—that of right conduct—in different contexts. Others have said that their different subjects give each their own distinct character. All, however, agree that the four virtues are interdependent, and that no one can live well without practicing all four.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that virtue is a habit, and is built the same way as any other habit: by practice and repetition. As Aristotle said, we learn to be builders by building, to be harp players by playing the harp, and to be virtuous by doing virtuous actions. The first step to acquiring any virtue is to act as if you had it, to start behaving justly, temperately, and so on. Unless you’re a very good person already, this will be very difficult at first, but the more you do it the more you will see and feel the benefits in your life and the easier it will become.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore the four virtues, what each consists of, how each relates to the other, and how to implement them in your life and relationships so as to live well and be happy.

This is the first in a series of essays explaining the cardinal virtues and how each applies to our everyday lives. Check back soon for the next installment!