The love experienced within the family offers a favorable climate where that personal relationship with God which is the source of authentic individual and community renewal can take root and develop. Obviously this implies that it is genuine love. Often, unfortunately, in the hedonistic culture we experience today, it is rather its caricature and even its betrayal that are labeled with the name of love. Appropriately, the biblical passage just proclaimed is, in two instances, concerned with clarifying the true meaning of love. Here is love at its source.
Love is the gift of self.
It means emptying oneself to reach out to others. In a certain sense, it means forgetting oneself for the good of others. Authentic human love reflects within itself the logic of the divine. In this perspective, the duty of conjugal fidelity can be fully grasped. Next to this comes fruitfulness, another typical aspect of the relationship between spouses.