The importance of discerning the difference between Love, Caring, and Passion is crucial.

We observe monstrous situations in couples today, and psychology fails to understand why the increase in divorces, domestic violence, and deaths has escalated in recent years. Science is sought, chemistry is studied, social studies are conducted, everything possible is done, but we still fail to understand what is happening. However, it is something so simple that a child instructed in the Scriptures could discern and make the right decisions when choosing a partner. They were not confused.

Many confuse among the three and make their partner decisions based on the wrong criteria. The dangers of making this decision based on the wrong criteria are that the end will be disastrous. Since the Word of God has been withdrawn from homes, this situation worsens every day. And we, human beings, will never understand unless we take God into account. God is the center of every marriage, and if God is not there, it is a marriage prone to destruction. The problem is not only that couples are destroyed, but entire families with children suffer this damage, and it continues, as the scripture says, to the 3rd and 4th generation.

Why? Why does scripture say this?

Because that poorly founded couple ends up sowing a seed in their children, who, if one of them does not decide to choose God for their lives, will choose the wrong feeling to get married, and the story will be worse than the first, because now it becomes a normality and the effects are disastrous, sometimes infidelities, jealousy, anger, quarrels, and sometimes death. Not only spiritual death, which is the most important, but physical death. These couples are now fostered with new precepts in this world that encourage couples to move away from God and go after erroneous ideologies, and in the end, they go from one damaged couple to another, leaving a legacy of children who suffer from the same misfortune. And you say they become aggressors and harm people, these individuals raised in these families.

God tells you no.

They are victims themselves of original sin, of those who led the first union with the wrong decision, confused about the difference between love, passion, and caring. Are they victims? Yes, because as they did not know or were not instructed in the One who designed the perfect marriage and went after worldly ideologies and precepts, they did not know what happened to them or how to correct it. And in their environment, the consequences of the curse of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation manifest themselves in their lives and the lives around them, damaging and harming themselves without understanding why. They are all victims. There is not a single aggressor. In their minds, they are victims. People judge them as aggressors for what they see. But at the end of their actions, they are based on an ideology or precept far from God's instructions.

In a marriage, we have seen people who care for each other but do not love each other. We can care for a friend, a brother, a father, a mother, or even like a stranger and want them. Caring for another person, helping, taking care, talking, instructing, and we always want to include caring to love. But we have to understand that the most powerful of all these is to love. Because love does not come from us, it is something given by God. We will never have love in our mortal bodies if we do not have the Holy Spirit of God. Because our mortal body is selfish, egocentric, angry, contentious, and has a thousand attributes, but you will not find love. And without God and the Holy Spirit, you will never be able to love. You will do good actions in search of a reward, be it love, money, attention, or approval, but it will not be pure and clean love. A type of love that is the opposite.

We have to understand the power of love. Christ died for love of us, he was the example to follow of how powerful love is. To die for those who hated you, mistreated you, and hit you. To die for your enemies, this can only be the love of God. There is nothing like it. But whoever does not know God does not know how to love. And this type of love you will not find in our mortal body. It is not there. Only God can give it to us, and if you do not have love, you will never be able to love. You may distribute all your goods to the poor, but you did not do this action out of love, you did it to receive a reward of praise, estimation, something that makes your body feel good. But this does not exactly involve what love is. And we have to understand why caring is not enough to sustain a union, it is imperative that God has given the gift of love with his Holy Spirit. Without it, it is not an agreement between both parties, but when the test comes, it falls apart.

What is the test?

The test that comes to every marriage is passion. Unbridled passion is horrific, it destroys marriages and families day by day, taking whole generations to the dump, producing more and more seeds of damaged marriages heading for destruction, at full speed.

And why passion?

Passion is a work of our mortal body. This work was allowed by God because without passion, how would human beings reproduce? Passion had to be there so that we had the desire for intimacy. But this was the only reason. Passion should never exist alone. It is a derivative of love. Meaning, there should never be a marriage based on passion. Passion is selfish, it always wants to gratify the person themselves.

However, passion, derived with love, complement each other, and it is not about self-gratification, it is about gratifying your partner. And when the time comes for the physical to age, love always sees it the same, but passion ends and you start looking elsewhere to satisfy passion. It's not that passion is not necessary. It is. But passion without love is infidelity. And when there is infidelity, there is mistreatment of the partner at the moment. Because if there is no love, you are not satisfied with what you have and you look for something to satisfy this need. Because intimacy is a need of the body. We cannot deny that all those who do not have the gift of continence will have passion.

But if they do not have the gift of continence, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn.

There are many people who marry out of caring without loving and say, I can. But their end is disastrous. Or they say, I can be alone, I do not need a partner. They lie to themselves because the desire to have intimacy will always be there. And when they walk down the street, or at school, or at work, they will be sinning, desiring to have intimacy with one or another who attracts them. The gift of continence also comes, like love, from God, and many of the priests who now make the covenant of abstinence are destined to fail. Because I cannot say, I have the gift of continence, it is something from God. And a covenant cannot be made with the mind or the flesh if it does not have to come from God. And they sin and make the parishioners sin with desires that they themselves cannot contain. The most delicate The importance of discerning the difference between Love, caring, and Passion is crucial. thing in a marriage when there is only caring, but not love, is that when you see with your eyes something that pleases you, one of the two in the couple sins.

And at that moment, the Holy Spirit in you stirs, if you had it, and you begin to see all the defects of your partner, to mistreat them and make them feel less until you destroy their esteem, value, dignity, and feelings, sometimes leading to divorce, separation.

What happened?

You did not have God, you did not have love for your partner, and you saw their nature, which is theirs. Because it does not depend on age, appearance, deficiencies, or compatibility, when you love someone, nothing separates you. For this reason, we see couples so different, but very strong, and you say, how did he or she get interested in him or her? They did not get interested, God united them. And therefore, love does not see defects or differences.

So we see that the precepts of the world say that there must be a resemblance to get married, but no, marriage does not work like that. Marriage is unconditional love that God places between you and your partner. And if God does not put it, you are destined to failure or a life full of infidelities, jealousy, anger, quarrels, and everything else.

Now, passion. The problem with young people today is that the world or the precepts of society feed them saying, follow your passion. The most erroneous thought that can exist. Look at what God says.

Flee also youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.

Passion is a derivative of love. Something that is needed for humanity to reproduce, but you can never focus your marriage on passion. Because passion ends, passion gets sick, passion gets out of control, and unbridled passion leads you to the death of a marriage and eventually to yourself. And God instructs young people to flee from it. Because a young person guided by their passion destroys many more young people and one or another adult. The saddest thing is that there are adults who never learned, and now they are producing seed after seed of children with the same problem or worse.

Summary.

So let us understand that it is necessary to have God for a person, not only to love your neighbor, but above all, with your partner. Without the gift of God, you are destined to failure. It is such that even the Apostle Paul had the gift of continence and said in Corinthians' letters: "Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?". He had the need to have intimate relationships, but God did not let him marry, and he complained to God saying: do I not have the same right as the other apostles to have a believing wife?

The saddest thing is that the world not only follows these precepts, but also destroys marriages that God joined based on worldly precepts, thus condemning people united by God to spiritual death. They live in all kinds of adultery and fornication, thinking that they are doing good, but their end is death. Not only do we choose wrongly when we marry, but we also destroy what God has joined because it does not fit into our erroneous concepts.

Jaime Miguel Hodges Martinez

Iglesia Católica Apostólica Romana