Simone Weil on Marriage

With the continuing rise of divorce rates, we don't even know what marriage means anymore as a culture.

I am reading Simone Weil's Need for Roots with my students right now. Her political philosophy is radical. It is tied to a focus on the obligations we have to the other rather than on the preservation of our personal rights. If we are all obligated to the needs of the other and recognize this level of attention to others, our culture mediates the good and people will flourish because as they are giving the good, they are receiving it as well. We are defined here by our otherness.

For her this is the definition of love – the otherness of things (not her phrase, but Diogenes Allen's phrase to describe it). If we are so obligated to the other and every other is also obligated to us, it is a consistent mutual giving and receiving that happens.

Going to a place Weil does not explicitly go here, this implies that we do not partner with people out of a need to feel more complete or right with the world. We partner out of our need to give to an other in the most intimate way. We do not marry because we need that person. We marry because we want to give of ourselves to that other person out of a desire to meet our obligation to an other. We can therefore give fully of ourselves, because the person with whom we partner, will always give back. The process begins with attention. We can suspend our own desires in order to attend to something not us.

This is how we mediate the love of God. Thus, in marriage, attention to our partner can be a source for the love of God to mediate and create both persons making them more whole in the process. We do not relate to our partners in this case, but we relate to that which relates us to our partner is we practice attention – the love of God, the source of the good.

That, is a beautiful definition of what love in a marriage should mean and what 50% of the married couples (first time married couples) do not experience often enough.

(A conversation @ Presbymergent inspired this post).

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