I’m getting married this year. As the day draws closer, amid all the preparations, we’ve found ourselves watching a run of wedding rom-coms. And a familiar pattern kept resurfacing.
For example, in Runaway Bride, the problem isn’t that love is absent, but that it is perpetually deferred. Maggie (Julia Roberts), the titular runaway bride, repeatedly abandons her weddings because something in her resists making a promise she doesn’t feel able to inhabit. She doesn’t want to stand at the altar pretending to be someone she isn’t. Still, the story assumes something many will recognise: the idea that love will only be true once we are fully sure of ourselves – and that when doubt appears, it’s time to head for the hills.
It is an assumption so common we rarely notice it. Escape becomes sincerity. Staying, by contrast, looks like compromise.
Seen as a story about growth rather than escape, Runaway Bride comes closer to a deeper truth than it can quite articulate. The film is far from being perfect (pacing issues really compress the emotional development of the second half) yet one of its strengths is that love grows not in spite of challenge, but through it. Maggie and Ike (Richard Gere) unsettle each other. They see through each other’s BS and, in doing so, call each other into greater honesty with themselves and with the people around them. Love lived through challenge matures us.
A pattern which felt uncomfortably familiar.
As part of my reading for the season, I read Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est – God is love. Because God has loved us first, Pope Benedict writes, love is no longer merely a command but a response to a gift. A gift which offers us a profound transformation.
Central to that transformation is Pope Benedict’s insistence that love is a single reality with different dimensions. Eros and agape are not opposed. When they are torn apart, what remains is a caricature. Christianity, he argues, did not reject eros but baptised it. Desire is not destroyed but is rightly ordered that it might become fully itself. What’s at stake is nether a suppression of longing or the body but a maturation of both.
Growth
Reading this first part of Deus Caritas Est during engagement has given me a language for something we have already experienced. The desire to know and the desire to love, grow together. What begins with attraction, often toward a mystery we only partly see or an image we have constructed, gives way to discovery. As the image crumbles before the reality of the person, love is not diminished but deepens. Desire shifts from grasping at possession to a desire to know – and be known in return.
In this sense, searching love does not disappear. The search remains but it turns outward. It becomes less about contemplating the self and more about communion with another person who is never full grasped.
Benedict suggests something more demanding yet hopeful – Love is not finished before commitment; it is formed by it”
I was recently on retreat when a priest told a story about visiting a couple celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary. As they spoke about their lives, each occasionally turned to the other in surprise: “I didn’t know you did that.” Even after decades together, there were still undiscovered rooms, still the capacity for wonder. Love had not exhausted the mystery; it had learned how to live within it.
Where Runaway Bride ultimately departs from Pope Benedict is in how it pictures resolution. Maggie’s searching is presented as something that must end before commitment can begin. But Benedict suggests something more demanding yet hopeful – Love is not finished before commitment; it is formed by it.
Engagement
Engagement has made something similar visible. Moments of difficulty aren’t the limits of love but an invitation. Each point of tension has asked for a renewed ‘yes’ – a choice to open more of myself to another, to trust more deeply, and to allow love to do its unsettling work. Rather than breaking a relationship apart, these moments have strengthened it, stripping away illusion and making room for a love less dependent on feeling and more rooted in gift.
Benedict insists that love is never merely a sentiment. Sentiments come and go; they may be a marvellous first spark, but they are not the fullness of love. Love unfolds as an encounter over time, always retaining an element of mystery.
If that is so, then preparing for marriage is not about securing certainty in advance, but about learning how to remain open to another person, to transformation, and to a love that continues to call us further in.
