Before You Say Yes: A Premarital Examination of Love

Most couples spend more time choosing a venue than examining their love. Karol Wojtyła thought this was a problem serious enough to address systematically. In Love and Responsibility, he insisted that a couple preparing for marriage should examine the quality of their love — not merely its intensity, but its orientation.[^1] What is this love for? Whose good does it serve? What happens when desire fades and sacrifice begins?

The four Greek terms — agape as divine charity, philia as friendship, storgē as familial affection, and eros as desiring love — function not as historical curiosity but as a diagnostic grammar. The vocabulary a couple actually lives by, even if they never name it, reveals the structure of what they have.

What follows is a practical guide built on that grammar, organized as a set of examination areas with questions a couple can sit with honestly before the altar.

The four loves as a diagnostic map

The error most couples make is not loving too little but confusing the loves. Eros without agape becomes acquisitive: the beloved is desired, not given to. Philia without eros can drift into a pleasant companionship that avoids the particular vulnerability of spousal union. Storgē — the instinctive warmth of familiarity — gets mistaken for depth when it is really just comfort.

Agape, because it represents the divine essence of love rather than merely its expression, must provide the ordering principle. This aligns precisely with what Wojtyła called the "personalist norm": the spouse is always an end, never a means.[^1] When eros is ordered by agape, desire becomes a vehicle of self-gift rather than self-gratification. When philia is ordered by agape, friendship becomes a mutual movement toward God rather than a mutual admiration society.

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus locates this ordering problem within the Fallen state of the person. Concupiscence, understood in the Thomistic sense as disordered desire, does not vanish at engagement. It takes new forms: the desire to possess rather than to receive, to be admired rather than to serve, to feel loved rather than to love. An honest premarital examination assumes concupiscence is present in both partners and asks where, specifically, it is operative.

Examination area one: What does this love cost you?

Gaudium et Spes describes conjugal love as self-giving that "pervades the whole" of a couple's lives and grows better through "busy generosity."[^2] The word busy matters. Generosity in marriage is not occasional; it is structural. Before marriage, the examination question is whether the love you are living is already costing you something.

Ask yourself, separately and together:

• When your partner needs something that inconveniences you — a late conversation, a change of plans, attention when you are tired — what is your first interior movement? Relief when the need resolves itself, or genuine willingness to give?
• Have you sacrificed anything for this person that you did not mention to them or receive credit for?
• When you imagine your future together, does the image center on what you will receive (companionship, affirmation, a family) or on what you will be required to give?

There is no correct answer that requires heroism. The question is about orientation, not performance. Eros that has never been tested by inconvenience has not yet revealed whether it can become agape.

Examination area two: Is your love ordered to pleasure, prestige, or the person?

Wojtyła distinguished between love and its counterfeits with unusual precision. Sentimentalism mistakes emotional intensity for love. Concupiscence mistakes physical desire for love. Both are real, both produce genuine feelings, and neither alone constitutes the self-gift that marriage requires.[^1]

The problem is not that desire exists but that it tends to expand to fill the space ordinarily occupied by the other loves. When a relationship is organized primarily around mutual attraction, mutual admiration, or the social status that comes with being a couple, the question is whether the relationship would survive the loss of those goods.

Practical questions:

• Would you still want this person if the physical desire substantially diminished — through illness, aging, or the ordinary rhythms of long marriage?
• Is part of this relationship's appeal the way it makes you appear to others? What would your love look like if no one knew about it?
• When you disagree sharply with your partner — about something that matters, not a triviality — can you give an account of their position that they would recognize as fair? Or does disagreement primarily feel like a threat?
• If your partner told you something that genuinely reduced your admiration for them, what would happen to the love?

The last question is among the most telling. Agape does not depend on the beloved's merit. Eros and the pleasure-seeking counterfeits do. A love that cannot survive disillusionment is not yet ready for marriage.

Examination area three: Do you love God more than you love each other?

This question is almost never asked in premarital preparation, and its absence is a significant omission. Amoris Laetitia, summarizing the tradition from Paul VI through John Paul II, frames conjugal love as "the way of the Church" and situates the couple's love within the couple's movement toward God.[^3] Benedict XVI is quoted there directly: "God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love."

This is not piety for its own sake. It is structural. A love ordered to God has an external referent that prevents it from collapsing inward. When two people make each other the ultimate good, they place on the relationship a weight it cannot bear. Disappointment becomes metaphysical. Conflict feels like annihilation. The ordinary diminishments of life together — boredom, frustration, the discovery that your partner is genuinely different from you in ways you did not anticipate — become crises of meaning rather than invitations to grow.

Wojtyła's point in Love and Responsibility is that a couple must not only love each other but love each other in God — meaning that their love is a participation in a love larger than themselves, one that makes demands on both of them that neither one of them invented.[^1]

Questions for examination:

• Is your relationship with God stronger, weaker, or unchanged since this relationship began? If weaker, what specifically accounts for that?
• Does your partner make it easier or harder for you to pray, to receive the sacraments, to live according to your conscience?
• Can you imagine telling your partner something that God requires of you, even if your partner does not want to hear it?
• Is God genuinely first in your hierarchy of loves, or is that a formulation you assent to without it organizing your actual decisions?

The last question deserves sustained honesty. Many people hold God's primacy as a cognitive belief while living as though the relationship is the organizing center of their lives. That inversion does not necessarily doom a marriage, but it does set up conditions in which the marriage will struggle to become what the Church understands it to be.

Examination area four: What kind of friendship underlies your love?

Philia — friendship love — is its own distinct category, not merely a subdivision of eros. This matters practically. John Gottman's research on marital stability consistently identifies friendship — specifically, the quality of positive regard and genuine interest in the other person's inner world — as a more reliable predictor of longevity than romantic passion.[^4]

Conjugal love requires loving each other as persons rather than as objects of pleasure or utility. Philia is the love that sees the other as a subject — someone whose thoughts, history, and convictions matter to you independently of what they do for you.

Examination questions:

• What does your partner think about when they are worried? What do they most fear? What do they believe about something that has nothing to do with the relationship?
• Do you enjoy your partner's company in situations that have no romantic dimension — a long errand, a difficult conversation, an ordinary Tuesday evening?
• When your partner succeeds at something that does not benefit you directly, what do you feel?
• Can you name three ways your partner has changed or grown in the time you have known them?

An inability to answer the first and last questions is worth pausing on — not as a verdict, but as an indication of where attention needs to go.

What the examination is for

This examination is not a test that can be passed or failed. Wojtyła was not naive about the incompleteness of human love. His point was that love grows through the will's commitment to a person, not through the prior achievement of perfect love.[^1] No couple enters marriage already loving each other with the fullness of agape. The examination exists to identify where the growth needs to happen and whether both partners are oriented, at least in principle, toward that growth.

Gaudium et Spes names the disposition directly: "Strengthened by grace for holiness of life, the couple will painstakingly cultivate and pray for steadiness of love, large heartedness and the spirit of sacrifice."[^2] Painstakingly is the operative word. The love that sustains a marriage is not discovered before the wedding; it is built, slowly and at cost, in the years that follow.

The couple who sits honestly with these questions before marriage is not proving they are ready. They are practicing the habit that marriage will require of them every day: the willingness to look clearly at themselves and each other, and to choose the harder love over the easier counterfeit.

References

[^1]: Karol Wojtyła, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

[^2]: Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965).

[^3]: Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (2016).

[^4]: John Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (New York: Harmony Books, 1999).