In our culture we carry a fairytale around in our pockets. Two people fall head over heels, and then comes the happily ever after. The feeling arrives first, and everything good is supposed to flow out of it. The feeling is the foundation. No feeling, no love.
In much of the rest of the world, it does not work like that at all.
The Fairytale We Were Sold
To this day marriages are arranged across large parts of Asia, the Middle East and beyond. To Western ears that sounds cruel. Inhuman, even. We picture a young woman handed to a stranger against her will.
And yet, listen to the people actually inside these marriages, man or woman, and you rarely meet someone who is miserable. If anything you meet the opposite. These unions often prove more durable, not less. The psychologist Robert Epstein spent years studying how love grows in arranged marriages and found a striking pattern: love in love-matches tends to start high and drift downward, while love in arranged marriages starts low and climbs, overtaking the love-match by around year five and running roughly twice as strong by year ten.
What The Arranged World Knows
How can this be? Start with the families, because we slander them. They are not cruel. They are looking for a genuinely good match. They want their child to be happy. And here is the uncomfortable part: they often know their own child better than the child knows himself. They see the character, the temperament, the long game. They weigh things that romance is blind to, and the research on marital satisfaction in arranged versus self-chosen marriages keeps finding that the partnership component, the building of a life together, holds up remarkably well.
Character outlasts chemistry. The families have always known that.
The Truth We Forgot
But underneath all of this sits a deeper truth, one rooted in Christianity and largely forgotten today.
You must love the person before they become loveable.
Not the other way round. We have it backwards. We wait to feel love so that we can then give it. The older and harder wisdom is that you give first, and the worthiness, the warmth, the loveliness, comes into being through the giving.
It Is Not Only About A Person
And it is not only about a person. It can be the calling. The vocation. The mission. The challenge you did not ask for.
It is the rich young man told to sell everything he owns and follow. A hard choice, and he walks away sad, because he loved his possessions more than the call. It is Peter, pulled away from his boats and his nets and made the first pope, long before he understood what he was saying yes to. And yes, it is Beauty and the Beast, where the girl has to love the beast first, choose him while he is still a beast, before she ever discovers the prince underneath.
You love it into existence. That is the pattern.
The Choice You Make When The Feeling Is Gone
This is also what marriage actually is, stripped of the fairytale. When it gets hard, when you do not feel it anymore, when the other person is unlovely and so are you, you love anyway. You make a choice to love. You dedicate yourself. Even if, at the very beginning, you are only pretending to.
And here is the thing almost nobody tells you. When you give yourself unreservedly, in spite of the inner objections and even the darkness, the feelings tend to follow. They come in behind the commitment, not in front of it.
Mood follows action. It always has. The fairytale got the order wrong.
