Love between man and woman, that love which expresses itself in happiness, is reciprocity, dialogue, exchange, total communication. This, too, is very new to those who are experiencing young love. For them, it’s all the more admirable and delectable because for years they’ve been plagued by a painful feeling of solitude. Sometimes drowsy, sometimes aggressive, often desperate, he was always there like a strange companion whose presence they couldn’t explain. Sometimes they rebelled against it, at other times they imagined they had taken its side: “We have no choice: we are alone,” wrote Rilke. It’s permissible to delude oneself, but I prefer to look the thing in the face, even though it makes you dizzy.“

The significance of this feeling of solitude is now clear to them: it prepared them for love and communication. How, indeed, would they have desired and welcomed love and communication if they hadn’t had the hard experience that it’s not good for man to be alone (Gen 2:18)? Solitude told them in negative what love teaches them today in positive: that communication is the profound law of being, that the human person is “relational”. Man exists with a truly personal existence only insofar as he exists for another - in the strong sense that contemporary philosophers give to this expression exist for… From now on, they know it, everyone says it: “I exist, now that I exist for you!”

To communicate, to communicate in spirit, from spirit to spirit, is a prodigious experience. But man is spirit incarnate. This communication takes place through bodies. A look, a smile, the pressure of hands, the gift of bodies - everything becomes a means of communication. Attitudes and gestures, like words, are charged with meaning. But the spirit has to be present to all these bodily activities, slipping into them to transfigure them, ensuring that they don’t degenerate into habits, automatisms or, what would be worse, the expression of bodily instinct alone.

Engaged couples and newlyweds are right to rejoice in the wonderful deliverance they owe to love. Thanks to love, they’ve just escaped from themselves. It’s a marvellous deliverance indeed, but let them beware: it’s also a merciless demand. It’s not just during the hours when it’s easy and charming to put everything in common that we have to communicate, but all through life. And if at first nothing seemed simpler - it was like a relief - we soon realize that the communication demanded by love goes much further than we thought. It’s not just a matter of conjugating the verb “to love”, of exchanging emotions, feelings and facile thoughts; it’s a matter of revealing one’s innermost being, one’s most intimate self, and discovering it for what it is, with all its riches and miseries.

And it’s not only at times when it’s delightful to receive, but at every moment, that we must welcome the presence, the words, the gift of another.

Yes, communication, even between those who love each other, is difficult, sometimes cruel. But its cruelty is that of the educator who forces a being to surpass himself, to deliver all his virtualities. Whoever accepts to communicate emerges into being. Those who refuse to do so condemn themselves to asphyxiation. In fact, only love can perform the miracle of making these walled-in people communicate, ever since Adam sinned and cut himself off from creation by cutting himself off from God.

It’s worth noting that true communication with one being brings us into relationship with the whole world: “Ah! I’ve found something so great, it’s love that should give me the keys to the world, not take them away from me”. There are so many moralists who fail to understand this “miracle”, who are constantly urging husbands and wives not to let themselves be captivated by love. True, we can love badly, and false love binds us, but true love frees the human heart.

The great teacher, the Holy Spirit, to whom love offers a particularly favorable field of action, works to help those who love each other move from communication with each other to communication with God. If they are already familiar with this, their love will greatly help them to live it more perfectly. All the laws of communication, which they discover day by day in their mutual relations, will soon appear to them as secrets for going further into the intimacy of their God.

To those who have not yet learned to live with God but aspire to do so, how important it is to make them understand that the Christian religion is communication between man and God, between every man and God. Communication in love. In other words, we need to present God’s plan to them as a great enterprise driven by God’s will to communicate with each of his children, as God’s call to man - to all men - to enter into a personal relationship with him. Then, on the level of faith as on the level of human love, and much more profoundly, man, in responding to God’s call of love, acquires the feeling of opening out into being, of discovering true life. Until then, he sometimes wondered whether his existence was real and not just a dream. Now he knows, he is, he lives. He exists, now that he exists for God, and because he exists for God.

Refusing to communicate is already self-destructive on a human level; on a religious level, it’s tantamount to death. We cut ourselves off from God - which is why moralists speak of mortal sin.

Just as human love, far from isolating us, gives us the keys to the world, so communication with God achieves the paradox of detaching man from all of creation, and bringing him into communication with all beings, but in God. Listen to Francis Jammes: “It seemed as if a new world opened up before his eyes. The bird, the tree, the stone had a clarity he had never known, and the tile struck by the falling sun was deep and clear. It was no longer that crazy, grotesque nightmare where things seem surprised to exist: now everything was as it is…” Reading these lines, one imagines that the author wrote them during his engagement; in fact, it was the day after his conversion. What makes it so easy to misunderstand is that all authentic love, and even more than conjugal love, God’s love, makes us a brotherly heart for all beings in the universe.

So the Spirit of God learns to communicate with God from this experience of communication in human love. He has another, even more powerful resource at his disposal. He brings back the feeling of loneliness at the very heart of love. Engaged couples and spouses panic: were they mistaken in thinking that love and solitude are incompatible, contradictory, that love had definitively eliminated the feeling of solitude? Could it be that Paul Valéry was right: “God created man, and not finding him lonely enough, gave him woman to make him feel his solitude”? Let them not be troubled, let them not imagine that their love is at fault, let them not hasten to think: It’s my fault, it’s her fault…

Instead, let them question their experience of solitude. It will remind them that this feeling that burned their adolescence had a meaning: it warned them then that man was not made for tête-à-tête with oneself, but for communication in reciprocal love. Their solitude today, and precisely within love itself, is of an entirely different order. It’s a warning too, but whereas for the teenager it was an invitation to dialogue with the woman, today it’s an invitation to dialogue, to communicate with God. They may have believed that their human love was enough to fill their hearts… God couldn’t let them stay in error for long. They were made for another kind of love, so let them not delay in responding.

Would Christians be preserved from this new intervention of the feeling of solitude? Doubtless, if their union with God were deep enough, if their human love were free of all illusion, they would not experience the bite. In fact, this feeling often appears in them too. One wrote: “Is life nothing but the apprenticeship of solitude, and marriage the subtlest means of achieving it?” No, not the most subtle way to solitude, but life with an Other who puts an end to all solitude.

And in the Christian home, this Other is not far away. It’s in the conjugal dialogue itself that we can meet him. Did he not say: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Mt 18:20)? But the spouses are worried: isn’t this call of another love to be feared? Will conjugal love not be offended? The answer was given to me one day by a friend who told me of his deeply religious wife: “When she has prayed, her tenderness for me is renewed.”

Father Henri Caffarel identifies communication as an essential element of the state of grace that emerges with love. He emphasizes that this communication not only sustains the conjugal relationship, but also influences our relationships with others.

The path to true communication begins with the experience of solitude, a sensation that can be distressing, but which reveals an essential truth: the human being exists to enter into relationship, to say “I exist because I exist for you”. This discovery pushes towards love and constant communication, whether verbal, gestural or even spiritual, leading us towards a higher dimension of happiness, always accompanied by the Spirit.

God wants and rejoices in our happiness. However, spouses need to recognize that communication is not limited to the good times, but needs to be nurtured in the bad too. Sometimes, it can seem as if we’ve lost something of what captivated us in the other person. At such times, communication becomes a call to share what’s deepest and most intimate within us, always open to listening and being listened to. This effort to maintain authentic communication takes love to a deeper, more spiritual level.

Conjugal love, moreover, reflects our relationship with God. In Christianity, religion is conceived as a loving communication between God and each person. By discovering our divine purpose, we can say: “I exist because I exist for God”. This bond with Him becomes the model for our human relationships, where we also feel called to love, share and relate.

Although the feeling of solitude can arise even in the midst of love, it need not frighten us. It’s an invitation to remember that we’re not made for solitude, and that God will always be at our side, helping us to find comfort and fulfillment both in our human relationships and in our connection with Him.

The couple’s relationship is a complex and multi-faceted one, embracing all the strands of reality, and not always played out in total and happy intimacy or in privileged and perfect moments. By living together, the couple gets to know each other so intimately that the weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, the “shadows” that were already creeping in when they first got to know each other, and which each had disguised at the start, become all too obvious. Day by day, and by power of repetition, these flaws become so present that they often mask everything else. Exceptional traits are reduced to rubble in the face of the little pitfalls of everyday life. This attractive person, so eagerly discovered at first, is finally very close, too close even, to continue to arouse the same admiration. There’s a widespread belief that when you fall in love, you develop an ideal vision of the person you love, and when that fades, you come face to face with the truth. But it’s not exactly like that. What the beginning of love reveals about the other does not belong to the genre of illusions. On the contrary, it’s the door that opens, allowing a glimpse of what’s truer and better in the other, provided that the participatory exercise that engenders love in the early days remains active between the two. So it’s an exercise; you have to get involved, it’s participative, so it’s up to both of them. If only one is involved, the exercise becomes almost impossible. If we use the intelligence of the heart, that capacity to understand and accept life, we can discern whether, despite the obscure and contradictory points we have revealed in him or her, the positive points compensate for that other negative side we know to be a source of suffering. And above all, cultivate a heart full of mercy, which understands and accepts, which is patient and knows how to excuse, which rests its gaze with love on the person of the other, which stops criticizing and learns to express praise, which recognizes the need it has for the other and tells it so. It’s very easy to feel attracted by what we can receive; it’s more difficult to ask ourselves what the other needs.

1: As we begin our Sit Down, after placing ourselves under God’s gaze, take some time for individual reflection, equipped with pen and paper, and make an effort of memory and insight to answer the following two questions:

• a: What did I like about the other person when we first met?

• b: Can I name all the qualities and beauties that I still discover in my partner?

When we’ve had enough time, talk about what we’ve written and talk to each other.

2: As a teenager or young adult, did I feel loneliness before I met my future spouse? Talk about this state of loneliness, its evolution at the beginning of our relationship and after several years of marriage.

3: What is the relationship between solitude and closeness to God? Has a certain solitude brought us closer to God? And in what way?

4: What are our preferred modes of communication? Have they changed over the years? How do we take into account our own body language and that of our partner? Let’s talk about the place of tenderness in our relationship?

5: To love is to get to know the other more each day. And we’ll always have to find out by listening and sharing. Can we identify what stands in the way of communication with our partner? Can we take stock of every obstacle to communication, and work together to find ways of removing them.

No foul language should come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for needed edification, that it may impart grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. [And] be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

1: The Christian religion is man’s relationship with God. God’s purpose is to establish personal relationships with his creatures. How do we live out these two loves - the love of God and the love of our spouse? How can we help each other in our relationship with God?

2: God has given us our spouse to love. Father Henri Caffarel writes that it is in conjugal dialogue that the Holy Spirit teaches us to communicate with God. How do we organize our Sit Down? How do we prepare for it? What do we put in place so that our hearts are ready to welcome this time of adjustment to love each other better, and to experience in our love, the divine love of our God?

3: Share how marital communication, in love and in truth:

• brings us into communication with God Himself,

• makes us aware that we exist, not just for my partner, but also for God.

• opens us up to otherness - God’s otherness, but also the otherness of all human beings.