What if the elective couple were one of the driving forces of the new society? The world is in turmoil. Protecting the environment and combating climate change require a peaceful revolution. The driving forces behind this coming change want to rally all potential supporters. Have they considered listening to elective love? A path of discernment and fulfillment, the way of elective love is a tremendous opportunity to put reconciled humanism and spirituality back at the center of everything. What if the road to a more just, more ecological, and more lively world passed through this crossroads ?
The elective couple and what if their spirituality was experienced as a promise
The co-elective couple: a spirituality to be invented
Even though many people no longer see themselves in what the Church conveys, spirituality is still alive and well. Couples are searching for meaning. It is therefore more essential than ever to work with them to invent models and rituals that are meaningful to them. People experience the outside world through their five senses and interpret it with their minds. Our perception of others extends far beyond their appearance; sometimes we can sense what they are not consciously expressing through empathy. But listening deeply and engaging in explicit dialogue between spouses leads to further discoveries, because no one is a mind reader, and we are called to move beyond hasty interpretations and bring unspoken thoughts to light. Two spouses experiencing the same event at the same time will have different feelings about it. It is this mystery of otherness (a whole dimension that escapes our grasp, which we refer to when we talk about spirituality).
Co-elective spirituality: an approach to be generalized
Spirituality experienced within a couple nourishes spouses deeply. The couple is revitalized when it takes the time to maintain personal spaces for reflection and contemplation. In a world that urges us to perform well and constantly show ourselves in the best light, it is essential to be able to recharge our batteries within our relationship, but also as a couple, through various means and by connecting with inspiring places and activities. It is therefore necessary to provide couples with the tools to experience spirituality personally and as a duo. We must be attentive, and make them attentive, to the way in which their love for each other and the way they interact with the world makes sense and proves inspiring, even if all this seems self-evident to them. Revitalizing, soothing, and fostering creativity: spirituality as a loving inspiration is an integral part of the co-elective adventure, the adventure of the chosen couple.
Co-elective spirituality and its challenges
Analysing the situation: a necessary moment to step forward
Couples are subject to the disruptions coming from the modern world. On a global scale, in many places, organized crime and terrorism, war and poverty, as well as addictions and sexual violence, are seriously damaging relationships and families. Everyone in the West is now confronted with mercantile pressures, including advertising strategies. Pornography damages the image of beneficent sexuality by presenting it as a performance contest, degrading women in particular by reducing them to sex objects, and all in an unrealistic way. Everything is scripted and overplayed. Finally, on the spiritual side, we sometimes convey the illusion that personal well-being is the key to everything, ignoring economic mechanisms and market forces. We also sometimes imagine that faith, if not religious observances, can do anything, and that those who stumble are weak. Many other factors also contribute to the weakening of traditional social models. Conversely, the co-elective couple promotes a living art of relationship that transcends the vicissitudes of today’s world without denying or fleeing them.
Drawing on various sources of inspiration to launch promising processes
Faced with this onslaught, what does living a vibrant relationship, one that brings personal and marital fulfillment and is not solely focused on materialism, really offer? This raises questions about our relationship with the future: if everything is falling apart, if the ground is shifting beneath our feet, what is the point of building something new, of laying solid foundations to prevent ourselves from sinking? Is there still room for spontaneous generosity, a thirst for life, and trust? Can the modern world’s relentless drive to turn everyone into a production machine overcome fundamental humanism, a living and enlightened spirituality… overcome the human soul, which ultimately aspires to happiness? Another path is possible.
Family pastoral care, a support for the sustainable development of couples
Questioning the benefits of co-elective spirituality
We can draw inspiration from civil society, but also from Christian traditions, to reflect on how to support couples. In Catholicism, we talk about pastoral care for couples in terms of respectful and inspiring guidance. Certain visions of human beings (or anthropologies) that were, and still are, influential among Protestants (family spirituality) and Catholics (marital spirituality), as well as Rogerian views, converge to a certain extent to open up new avenues for couples. Here, we can particularly draw on Pope Francis, who noted: “There is great nobility in being able to initiate processes whose fruits will be reaped by others, placing one’s hope in the secret forces of the good that is sown.” In The Joy of Love, published in 2016, he continually recognizes every couple of good will as a source of inspiration and a place of respectable creativity, without reducing this esteem to submission to an absolutized norm. Nor is it more appropriate to settle for “everyone is free” while neglecting to offer elective couples broad access to various resources conducive to their long-term development; without equating them with expensive products and other misleading artifacts. No, lavish weddings and honeymoons in Dubai do not determine marital harmony!
Culture’s approach to couples and families needs to be reinvented. It’s about being, not having. We need to consider that we must take care of our couple and our people, viewing them as a living reality. We need to reconsider crises as a factor for growth and not hesitate to seek help. Stop thinking that everything will happen automatically, as if love were a god or a magician who exempts us from investing in the relationship and building and steering our shared project together.
Putting ourselves at the service of hope
Christian marriage emphasizes the importance of the three faces of love: Eros, Agape, and Philia. It is, rather than despairing or floating on air, about echoing these three faces of love. Having a wide range of options and modalities allows everyone to find their place. Promoting teaching methods that combine respectful dialogue, an openness to transcendence (since having is not the be-all and end-all of existence), humor, art, and even moments of celebration and creativity helps to build a couple that is “good enough” for everyone in it to mature. Couples need to be shown that co-elective innovation is a rare opportunity. We can provide concrete support to couples. This proactivity is promising, because this style of marriage is a lever for personal and collective maturation that can lead to positive change in society. The path of elective love leads to more constructive and healthier alliances, thanks to its potential for resilience and inspired realism.
The essentials in a nutshell
The path of elective love is a way of life for married couples that first revitalizes the loving partners, but also profoundly transforms all social relationships, as if by capillary action. Without expecting miracles, we can gradually change individualistic mindsets tempted by the frenzy of production and consumption, which is destructive on a large scale. For couples, it is based on a living spirituality.
All in all:
- The elective couple is nourished by a spirituality experienced as a promise
- When it comes to elective couples, spirituality remains to be invented
- Co-elective spirituality is a reality to be discovered and promoted
- Building a spirituality for the chosen couple requires overcoming many challenges
- Starting by identifying and taking into account the situation, using intuition allows us to move forward together, developing creative solutions
- Questioning the benefits we derive from co-elective spirituality frees us from misleading assumptions, social pressures, and fatalism
- Appropriate aid for couples in general, and inclusive family pastorale care in particular, are a support for the sustainable development of the couple and require:
- Bringing together various inspirations to launch promising processes
- Putting ourselves at the service of hope rather than giving in to fatalism
By keeping hope in the power of love, we open new paths to the future. To learn more, you can read Sylvie Barth‘s thesis, “La voie de l’Amour électif” (The Path of Elective Love), or at least watch her inspiring videos. She is an author, lecturer, radio host, and relationship specialist. Her work is a tremendous piece of research and analysis, a reference on the subject of contemporary couples in search of meaning and inspiration.
Article written by :
L’Encrier de l’Atelier
Rédacteur Web Freelance
✉️ lencrier.delatelier@gmail.com
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