Red Hot Catholic Love

Happy February 1st! For the month of St. Valentine, let’s talk about love, love, love! Red Hot Catholic Love – as per Tim Muldoon:

Some twenty years ago my girlfriend and I made a daring wager: what if we did exactly what the Church recommended when it came to sex?

At least in this first twenty-year span, the answer is this: experience joy.

We dated. We talked about sex. Of course we wanted it. But we waited.

Ours was a transcontinental romance nourished by letter-writing (which I recommend even in this age of the internet, because of the meditative quality of ink on paper). We approached our love deliberately, thoughtfully, and found over time that love grew. In retrospect, I think that our decision to wait for sex was a kind of pruning, allowing the growth of other elements of relationship: conversation, creative use of time, appreciation of the small joys of hand-holding and long kisses.

(Fast forward: this evening our eleven-year old remarked with some measure of disgust that our frequent long kisses are kind of yucky. We take that as confirmation that we got something right, nearly eighteen years into marriage.)

Read the whole thing!