Week 6 - "But charity is the pure love of Christ"



I confess that when I first read about love maps my first impression was: how am I going to do this? I don´t have time! But, after pondering and doing the first Love Map questionnaire I realized that I was not so bad actually.
I remember years ago to hear that to love Christ we need to know Him through the scriptures, this same principle was cleverly used by Gottman. The love map is an important tool to help couples to know each other more profoundly, put it in other words, the Love Map it is actually more than a tool, knowing each other, not only superficially but with profound and genuine interest, with empathy and altruism, is probably the most important objective that a couple must work on in order to gain, not only temporal happiness, but most important an eternal happiness.
The deep questions, ideas and other mechanisms developed by Gottman are not new, many of us, consciously or unconsciously, did or will do at least some of the love map questions during his married life.
Actually, this Love Map questionnaire works like a kind of therapy, when we are invited to look to ourselves and analyze our triumphs and strivings, or our mission and legacy (although that question about writing your own obituary was a little creepy), help us do a self-analysis, and it is through this kind of self-therapy that we could understand our place in the world.
It is interesting that the second greatest commandment of the law is to love your neighbor as yourself. How can we love the most important of all neighbors – our spouse, if we don´t love ourselves?
Further, but not totally surprising, Gottman explains that fondness and admiration are “antidotes for contempt”. Once again, if the purpose of knowing each other is to help us love more completely, then couples must express their feelings with acts of affection, fondness, and admiration.
Christ is the perfect example, he knew perfectly, he loved perfectly, and he expressed His feelings perfectly. When he arrived late to where His loved friend Lazarus was, Mary (Lazarus sister) “fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died”. “When Jesus therefore saw her weeping…” he also wept (John 11:32-35). Christ had this perfect empathy for others, he wept with his friends, and perfectly understand them.
Gottman´s work expresses many of this Christ attributes as necessary conditions to marriage happiness, although Jew, his work is full of Christlike qualities.

“But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.” (Moroni 7:47)

 References

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work : A Practical Guide From the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert. New York: Harmony.

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