Is True Love Possible?

Marriages today are failing dramatically. In the last 40-50 years, the divorce rate has climbed to 50%! In fact, most marriages today are lucky to last ten years! What’s worse is that divorce means we turn our backs to the ones we have vowed never to leave – even in sickness, poverty, and, yes, even childrearing! Marriage should be a foretaste of heaven – unfortunately for many, it’s a foretaste of hell.

What’s happened in this short time period to do so much damage?

G.K. Chesterton, in 1920, warned us of the looming threat when he saw that divorce itself was becoming socially acceptable. He said: “The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will find it all the easier to be united for no reason.” Most divorces today signify our slavery to sin. Remember physical slavery in early American history? One key argument against it was that it broke up the African American family. Divorce, too, breaks up the family – but unlike physical slavery, we walk into this new slavery by abusing our own freedom. We freely choose to be enslaved.

But what sin could blind us so incredibly that we would divorce the one person we are called to love above all else? For many, it’s lust. Sex itself can produce a chemical high in someone that is similar to heroine. The Kinsey Institute, which is by no means a right-wing organization, released a study that showed that some 30% of homosexual males in the San Francisco area had had around 500 different sexual partners. I honestly don’t know how anyone can believe there’s not something psychologically disordered about someone (homosexual or heterosexual) who has sexual relations with 500 different people!

But what dawned in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the chemical contraceptive – the pill. Originally scientists worked on a version for both men and women but the male research was halted when one man’s testicle (one, not both) shrank by something like 2-3%. Okay, I guess I can see how those male scientists wanted to stop at that point! So at least we must assume nothing bad happened to the women, right? Actually, three died. The scientists just decided to change the dose.

In other words, the scientists think women are stupid.

That being said, the chemical contraceptive would have its negative effects on the health of both men and women. Johnson and Johnson just paid $68 million in settlements with women who have suffered significantly from the new contraceptive patch. Some common side effects of the chemical contraceptive include: irritability, depression, nausea, and a reduced sex drive. Oh yeah, and the anti-depressants taken to reduce side effects produces an even lower sex drive. Moreover, women who take chemical contraceptives have a sex drive that’s about seven times lower than a woman who isn’t contracepting - and new studies are showing that women who stop using chemical contraceptives will still have a sex-drive that’s four times lower than normal for the rest of their lives. Why a man would want a woman to feel like this is beyond me!

Chemical contraceptives have an even greater hormonal side effect. Back in the 1960’s, a scientist who studied the similarities between animal behavior and human behavior performed an experiment in which the females in a small ape community were given chemical contraceptives. Now apes, like humans, give off pheromones to attract a mate when they are fertile. Chemical contraceptives, however, render a woman chemically infertile – meaning that she will not give off those mate-attracting pheromones. Eventually, when all the female apes were contracepting, the males stopped having sex with them and started having sex with each other. This led the scientist to predict a rise in homosexuality among human males – and boy did that come true over the last 40 years! So the next time I hear a woman say that: “All the good men are married or gay,” I’ll tell them and their friends to get off the pill! (Of course, there are also plenty of psychological reasons why people develop a homosexual orientation.)

What’s more is that the chemical contraceptive can lead women to choosing losers to date and marry. It, too, goes back to the hormonal effects of chemical contraceptives. Women are capable of telling if a man is an “evolutionary-fit” man (i.e. a winner) by his smell. A study was done in which such men were given shirts to wear for a day while another set of shirts were given to a set of losers. Women who did not contracept smelled both shirts and were asked which ones were worn by men they’d like to date. They choose the winners. And the conracepting women? You guessed it, they choose the losers. Why? Because chemical contraceptives make a woman’s body think it’s pregnant and chemicals are released from the brain keeping women away from “evolutionary-fit” males in order to keep them with their husbands during pregnancy. But since contracepting women are typically looking for companionship, their hormones help them find the wrong man!

On the flip side, fertile women give off pheromones to attract men – and studies prove that men can be more attracted to a fertile woman than to a supermodel! One particular study placed clothing worn by fertile women in a room with men that looked at images of “plain” women. Then men looked at images of supermodels but without the pheromone-rich clothing in the room. In the end, the men preferred the average fertile woman over the supermodels! Now that we have a significant portion of today’s women contracepting (and thus giving off little to no male-attracting pheromones) we see them having to starve themselves and wear almost no clothes in order to attract a man that she doesn’t really want anyway!

Most people don’t know this, but contraception’s history in the 20th century grew out of a desire for selective breeding. Margaret Sanger, the founder of abortion’s Planned Parenthood, pressed contraceptives as the tool have more “children for the fit, less for the unfit.” She fought to make contraceptives prevalent around Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and eastern Europeans – those who she viewed were “unfit” to reproduce. It shouldn’t surprise us that she and her companions were great supporters of Nazi Germany. As she watched contraception grow in Germany, she congratulated them for “weeding out the worst grains of Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

Sick. But that’s where contraceptives today come from.

Okay, so far I’ve talked a lot about contraceptives and how they can really debilitate one in finding a spouse and “true love” along with it. There is, however, another problem (though some do not view it to be a problem) that rises from contraception: promiscuous sex. When contraceptives were originally promoted, they were thought to help people avoid pregnancy and maybe even keep people from having sex. The fact is, unwed pregnancies have risen from 6% of all pregnancies in 1960 to around 33% today while another 25% end in abortion. What’s more, today something like 70% of all high school seniors have had some sort of sexual experience. Why is all this? Because contraceptives have taken the responsibility out of sex and have enabled young people to explore it when they really shouldn’t be.

But what most people don’t know is that the brain releases a chemical into the body during sex that acts like human crazy glue. This release makes one chemically bound to the other person. The problem is, the more people one sleeps with, the less effective this chemical is. So for all those people out there who hope for a happy marriage, sleeping with many people only hurts their physiological chances of finding true love.

Sex outside of marriage also leads to out of wedlock pregnancies. Many of these lead to another great evil: abortion. The fact is, few happily married women get abortions. 81% of abortions are from: never-married women (63% of total), divorced women (11% of total), separated women (6% of total), and widowed women (1%). And when one factors in the 10% of abortions coming from married women who committed adultery, it turns out that less than 10% of abortions are coming from happily married women! Some unmarried women, however, decide to have their baby but have a 68% chance of raising him in poverty. On the other hand, only 12% of children raised by once-married parents are raised in poverty.

Abortion is not about “freedom” for the woman, it’s about continuing a cycle of taking advantage of a woman for her body and leaving her in poverty later. It is depraved. Communism may have been depraved in thinking that the cure for pickpockets was to empty our pockets – but our abortionist-American society is even more depraved in that it seeks to cure poverty by emptying the poor mother’s womb.

Okay, so is true love possible? Yes

The key to finding true love, however, is chastity – which is self-mastery, self-control, and self-sacrifice. It’s a matter of letting our bodies do their thing instead of pumping them with hormones or in using someone’s body for our own selfish gratification. It’s about treating other people as people – as ends in themselves and not as means to an ends.

Ultimately, true love is about our relationship with God. Notice we talk about “being faithful” both when we talk about our relationship to our spouse and when we talk about our relationship with God. The Bible itself is bookended with marriages. The first is the union of Adam and Eve while the last is the union of Jesus (the new Adam) to his Bride, the Church (the new Eve) – you and me.

True love is free, total, faithful, and fruitful. When a couple makes their wedding vows, they are asked: Do you come freely? Do you give of yourself fully (total gift of self)? Will you be faithful? Will you be open to new life (i.e. will you be fruitful?)?

In the end, I have to ask: Is your love free, total, faithful, and fruitful? Because that’s what true love is all about.