SOME wisdom pertaining to romantic love on this St. Valentine’s Day from Frank Sheed’s book Sanity and Society (Sheed and Ward, 1953):

Sex is a power of the whole man, one power among many: and man is not an isolated unit, but bound to his fellows in society: and his life on earth is not the whole of life, but only a beginning. To use the power of sex successfully we must use it in balance with the rest of our powers, for the service of the whole personality, within a social order, with eternity to come. And all this is too complex a matter to be left to instinct or chance, to desire or mood or the heat of the blood or the line of least resistance. It calls for hard thinking.

A summons to think about sex will be met with no enthusiasm. Men are not much given to thought about sex; as we have noted, they expect no fun from thought and are not much inclined to it or good at it: whereas they expect a great deal of fun from sex and persist in thinking (in the face of the evidence) that they are good at it. Not only that. They feel that there is something rather repellent, almost improper, in the association of sex and thinking. A man must be cold-blooded, they say, to use his reason on sex. The taunt of cold-bloodedness is one that we can bear with fortitude. To the man with fever, a normal temperature seems cold-blooded—but vitality goes with normal temperature, not with fever. And modern sex life is not, even by its own standards, very vital. Too many men who have reached middle life have to admit that for themselves sex has not lived up to its promise—that on balance their life has been rather more begloomed by sex than delighted by it. They have had plenty of glowing anticipation, a handful of glowing experiences, a mass of half-satisfactions and whole frustrations—with the horizon drawing in, and the worried feeling that the splendour has somehow eluded them. It is not from any brilliantly successful sexual life. of his own, that the typical man of today can deride the idea of using the mind on sex. Upon sex, as indeed upon all our other powers, we must use reason. Instinct is excellent for the lower animals, but we are not lower animals, we are rational; and the price we pay for our rationality is that reason is our only safe guide, to ignore it is always disaster. There is something pathetic about the philosophers who decry reason and raise the standard of instinct, as about little boys who play at being Red Indians. The little boys would not survive ten minutes in a Red Indian world, the philosophers would perish rather more quickly than the rest of us—for this philosophy has a great attraction for pallid men—in a world of instinct. The instincts that guide the non-rational creature to the fulfillment of his life—to choosing the food that will nourish or constructing the habitation that will shelter or providing for the preservation of his own life and the continuance of his species—do not guide man. All of these things we have to learn. What we call our instincts are natural desires strongly felt—like the instinct of hunger to eat, or of cold to be warmed, or of maternal love to protect, or of gluttony to surfeit, or of sloth to idle, or of pride to rule, or of covetousness to snatch, or of envy to vie, or of anger to kill, or of sex to possess. In themselves they are a mixture of necessary and dangerous: reason must sort them out, evaluate and control them—diminish some, strengthen others. The growth of a world in which men can live as men has been the growth of reason’s domination over the instincts—all the instincts, even the instinct of sex. There is no special privilege exempting sex alone from the control of reason. That it is more exciting than the others does not make it less in need of control but more. Any one of them, uncontrolled, can make human life unlivable—sex perhaps more so than the others. Over none of them will reason secure perfect control in the majority of us—certainly not over sex. But there is a world of difference between the man who aims at control though he only partially achieves it and the man who does not. Even partial control, which is all that most will achieve, is immensely worth striving for.

Thinking about sex will follow the same lines as thinking about any other thing—what does the law of God tell us, what does the nature of the thing itself tell us. Where the law of God is explicit and clearly known, we have enough for right action without further enquiry. But we should study the nature of the thing even then, as a way of understanding God’s law better and of entering into the mind of God who gave the law. In this matter of sex, we shall begin with the nature of man and then go on to the law of God.

Please follow and like us: