Like the love of God, this is a love capable of generosity. One desires the good of the other because he or she is recognized as worthy of being loved. This is a love which generates communion between persons, because each considers the good of the other as his or her own good. Each person is called to love as friendship and self-giving. Each person is freed from the tendency to selfishness by the love of others, in the first place by parents or those who take their place and, definitively, by God, from whom all true love proceeds and in whose love alone does man discover to what extent he is loved.
Man is called to love and to self-giving in the unity of body and spirit.
Femininity and masculinity are complementary gifts, through which human sexuality is an integrating part of the concrete capacity for love which God has inscribed in man and woman. Insofar as it is a way of relating and being open to others, sexuality has love as its intrinsic end, more precisely, love as donation and acceptance, love as giving and receiving. Married love thus becomes a power which enriches persons and makes them grow and, at the same time, it contributes to building up the civilization of love. In fact the gift reveals, so to speak, a particular characteristic of human existence, or rather, of the very essence of the person. Married love is fulfilled in openness to the other person and in self-giving, taking the form of a total gift that belongs to this state of life.