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THREE TO GET MARRIED
by Fulton J. Sheen, Ph.D., D.D.

Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. New York
Copyright, 1951, BY FULTON J. SHEEN
Nihil Obstat:

Rt. Rev. John M. A. Fearns, S.T.D., Censor Librorum
Imprimatur: Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York
April 16, 1951
Permission has been granted for inclusion of quotations from the
following books in copyright:
"Sex and Common-Sense" by Agnes Maude Royden. New York: 1922,
G. P. Putnam's Sons.
"Sex, Life and Faith" by Rom Landau. London: 1946, Faber & Faber
Ltd.
"The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran and
used by permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

"The Queen of the Seven Swords" by G. K. Chesterton. New York:
1933 Sheed and Ward, Inc. Used by Permission Of Miss D. C.
Collins.

"The Pilgrim of the Absolute" by Leon Bloy. New York: 1947,
Pantheon Books, Inc.
"Fancies vs. Fads" by G. K. Chesterton. New York: 1923, Dodd, Mead

& Co. Used by Permission of Miss D. C. Collins.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
It takes three to make Love in Heaven--

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It takes three for Heaven to make love to earth--
God, Man, and Mary, through whom God became Man.
It takes three to make love in the Holy Family--
Mary, and Joseph, and the consummation of their love, Jesus.
It takes three to make love in hearts--
The Lover, the Beloved, and Love.
To that Woman

Who taught the sublime mystery of Love,
Mary Immaculate,
This book is dedicated

That nations, hearts, and homes may learn
That love does not so much mean to give oneself to another
As for both lovers to give themselves to that Passionless Passion,
Which is God.
Contents

1. The Differences Between Sex and Love
2. Our Vital Energies
3. What Love Is
4. The Three Tensions of Love
5. It Takes Three to Make Love
6. Love is Triune
7. Unfolding the Mystery
8. Purity: Reverence for Mystery
9. The Dignity of the Body
10. Marriage and the Spirit
11. The Great Mystery
12. The Unbreakable Bond
13. Generation
14. Paternity
15. Motherhood
16. The Role of Children
17. Mary, Motherhood, and the Home
18. The Dark Night of the Body
19. For Better or For Worse
20. Love's Reaction to Loss
21. Love Endureth Forever

1. The Differences Between Sex and Love

Love is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands. The
will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure
associated with love, or what is today called "sex," is the frosting
on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it.
The greatest illusion of lovers is to believe that the intensity of
their sexual attraction is the guarantee of the perpetuity of their
love. It is because of this failure to distinguish between the
glandular and spiritual--or between sex which we have in common
with animals, and love which we have in common with God--that
marriages are so full of deception. What some people love is not a
person, but the experience of being in love. The first is
irreplaceable; the second is not. As soon as the glands cease to
react with their pristine force, couples who identified
emotionalism and love claim they no longer love one another. If
such is the case they never loved the other person in the first
place; they only loved being loved, which is the highest form of
egotism. Marriage founded on sex passion alone lasts only as long
as the animal passion lasts. Within two years the animal attraction
for the other may die, and when it does, law comes to its rescue to
justify the divorce with the meaningless words "incompatibility,"
or "mental torture." Animals never have recourse to law courts,
because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels
the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.

There are two reasons for the primacy of sex over love in a
decadent civilization. One is the decline of reason. As humans give
up reason, they resort to their imaginations. That is why motion

pictures and picture magazines enjoy such popularity. As thinking
fades, unrestrained desires come to the fore. Since physical and
erotic desires are among the easiest to dwell upon, because they
require no effort and because they are powerfully aided by bodily
passions, sex begins to be all-important. It is by no historical
accident that an age of anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, such
as our own, is also an age of carnal license.

The second factor is egotism. As belief in a Divine Judgment, a
future life, heaven and hell, a moral order, is increasingly
rejected,
the ego becomes more and more firmly enthroned as the source of
its morality. Each person becomes a judge in his own case. With
this increase of selfishness, the demands for self-satisfaction
become more and more imperious, and the interests of the
community and the rights of others have less and less appeal. All
sin is self-centeredness, as love is otherness and relatedness. Sin
is the infidelity of man to the image of what he ought to be in his
eternal vocation as an adopted son of God: the image God sees in
Himself when He contemplates His Word.

There are two extremes to be avoided in discussing married love:
one is the refusal to recognize sexual love, the other is the giving
of primacy to sexual attraction. The first error was Victorian; the
second is Freudian. To the Christian, sex is inseparable from the
person, and to reduce the person to sex is as silly as to reduce
personality to lungs or a thorax. Certain Victorians in their
education practically denied sex as a function of personality;
certain sexophiles of modern times deny personality and make a
god of sex. The male animal is attracted to the female animal, but
a human personality is attracted to another human personality.
The attraction of beast to beast is physiological; the attraction of
human to human is physiological, psychological, and spiritual.
The human spirit has a thirst for the infinite which the quadruped
has not. This infinite is really God. But man can pervert that
thirst,
which the animal cannot because it has no concept of the infinite.
Infidelity in married life is basically the substitution for an
infinite of a succession of finite carnal experiences. The false
infinity of succession takes the place of the Infinity of Destiny,
which is God. The beast is promiscuous for an entirely different
reason than man. The false pleasure given by new conquests in the
realm of sex is the ersatz for the conquest of the Spirit in the
Sacrament! The sense of emptiness, melancholy, and frustration is
a consequence of the failure to find infinite satisfaction in what is
carnal and limited. Despair is disappointed hedonism The most
depressed spirits are those who seek God in a false god!

If love does not climb, it falls. If, like the flame, it does not
burn
upward to the sun, it burns downward to destroy. If sex does not
mount to heaven, it descends into hell. There is no such thing as
giving the body without giving the soul. Those who think they can
be faithful in soul to one another, but unfaithful in body, forget
that the two are inseparable. Sex in isolation from personality does
not exist! An arm living and gesticulating apart from the living
organism is an impossibility. Man has no organic functions
isolated from his soul. There is involvement of the whole
personality. Nothing is more psychosomatic than the union of two
in one flesh; nothing so much alters a mind, a will, for better or
for

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