Spiritual Love
Sacrifice is the fundamental feature of spiritual love. This is not to say that spiritual love is evil.
On the contrary, love between mother and child is spiritual, but when applied to romantic relationships, it leads to their destruction, for it has thus been reduced to an act of humility.
And intimate relations are not meant to be an exercise in humility but in pride.
Let’s be clear, it is not a choice, but a fact of nature that one cannot and is not experiencing romantic love if they have to compromise their needs in the process.
This is not love; it’s rather psychological coercion manifesting itself as duty. And duty and intimacy cannot coexist simply because it is not physically possible.
Our bodies were designed to protest under those conditions, and they will eventually not respond
and become impotent.
Spiritual love demands that one should make love by making peace with the injustice of sexual repression.
It pronounces those needs as weaknesses, thereby destroying a man’s self-esteem and making the
possibility of romantic love inaccessible to him. WHY?
Because the most important condition for romantic love is self-esteem.
And a man without esteem is more inclined to break moral laws as a way of asserting the moral
autonomy he lost when his desire for intimacy was damned.
The irony is that spiritual love, when applied to our romantic relationships, ends up leading us to
an unsanitary spiritual existence.
Romantic love is a lofty goal for a man or a woman and very important to define because, in defining it, we will be compelled to define all the values that make its achievement possible.
What more practical incentive does one need to uphold their values than the potential for
romantic love and its corollary, sexual fulfillment?
Morality without its corresponding reward is a morality that gives men irrational goals because
its ultimate goal is your failure.
The morality of romantic love has only one goal: your total success in every venue of life.
The self-preservation of a man’s morality depends on his perception of love and intimacy, for
intimacy to be experienced properly, it cannot be perceived as only a duty within marriage or an act of depravity outside of it.
But rather, it should be viewed as a reward for the perfection of one’s duties and for the perfection of one’s nature as a moral being.
If you have a desire apart from moral values, then you are confusing desires with depravity.
And in doing so, you will be sentencing yourself to a life where pleasure will depend on the
limitations that sensory experiences can deliver.
When your standard of value becomes exclusively physical, you will not be able to experience
pleasure except through more and more forceful sensory experiences.
This is the root cause of the perverted forms of sexual behavior we are witnessing today.
Intimacy void of values gives an indication of a sexual capacity that will end up being premature or make the person increasingly perverse over time.
The antidote to such degeneracy is romantic love, properly defined.
What is Romantic Love?
Romantic love is a kind of love that requires the union of two confident individuals whose
confidence is not acquired through their loving soul mates.
Romantic love is judgmental; it’s an emotional response to your life partner, whom you recognize through your ability to recognize your own values in action.
Romantic love must be earned, not by seducing another, but by making yourself worthy of
seduction, and by making yourself someone worthy of the greatest reward that life has to
offer: True Love.
The aspiration for romantic love and intimacy is an aspiration towards morality, spirituality, and
closeness to God.
And so we are left with this strange reunion where romantic love, when put into practice,
develops all the features of being spiritual.
This is the nature of nature, and this is God’s prescription.
This is reinforced by Islam’s celebration of our practical sexual needs, not as something carnal but as something glorious.
It is something that is of the utmost priority in a man’s life.
Why? Because it is the means to the highest spiritual end. Romantic love is a goal worth
fighting for.
So let us heed the proverb: Let love come last, after the lesson is learned, for love, like all things,
must be earned!
This article is from our archives.