58. No mortal can satisfy all our longings. Real marital unity is based on God’s covenant, a covenant which welcomes erotic desire, but which even more fundamentally commits men and women to each other in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer. Christian marriage is not a romantic audition or a conditional arrangement “until further notice.” A so-called trial marriage, an attempt to live intimately but hypothetically, to test the relationship and pursue it as long as the romance is flowing, is a contradiction in terms. Pope Francis recently made this point in a public address:

But you both know that marriage is for life? “Ah, we love each other so much, but … we’ll stay together as long as the love lasts. When it ends, we’ll each go our separate way.” This is selfishness: When I feel like it, I’ll end the marriage and forget the “one flesh” that cannot be separated. It is risky to get married: it is risky! It is this egoism which threatens it, because we each have within us this possibility of a dual personality: The one that says, “I am free, I want this …” and the other which says, “I, me, to me, with me, for me….” Selfishness always returns and does not know how to open up to others.

In a postmodern world where trust is scarce, marriage seems daunting. We worry that we may be tied to someone wrong. In a globalized world, where economic anxiety is often well-founded, we may also worry that all of life’s challenges and questions, about financial or economic security, must be answered and put to rest before we can love as Jesus did.