Authentic Love: From Person to Person

27 March, 2026

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EduFamilia

Voices

27 March, 2026

11 min

Authentic Love: From Person to Person

From Infatuation to Commitment: The Path to True and Lasting Love

1. Authentic love: the love of giving

Authentic love: forever and from the bottom of my heart

With a vocation for eternity

The romance of falling in love points to the fulfillment that all authentic love anticipates.

In the promising spark of Romanticism, there is present, sometimes unconsciously, the imperative for a solid and unending way of loving. A different kind of love, an authentic love, that transcends the ephemeral nature of physical attraction and emotions that are more or less intense but always unstable.

Distinguishing between the two loves and encompassing the first within the second, without suppressing it, is essential to solidly build a marriage, discover the dynamics that govern it, and bring it to its fullness and happiness.

Because, although it is usually rooted in infatuation and is not at all opposed to it, the act of giving is another way of loving.

It is born with a vocation for eternity: forever.

Authentic love is born with a vocation for eternity:
forever!

Anchored in the deepest part of the person

Authentic love undoubtedly brings into play the perishable dimensions of man or woman, linked to matter.

But it involves the whole person of each of them.

Active, at least:

all the vigor of understanding;
the unparalleled strength of will;
the free capacity to build oneself up and to do good to others;
And the inclination towards self-giving , which, as a summary of all the above, is the very condition of the person!

In other words, it leads to discovering something unique, profound and grand, endowed with an intimate richness and density that only a truly enamored intelligence is capable of appreciating.

Someone , more than something, who rises infinitely above external attractiveness and the ability to awaken even indelible emotions in us.

Authentic love reveals to us
the most intimate and profound greatness
of the person we love.

Discoverer of the beloved “person”

Such a form of love cannot be experienced by those who live on the surface.

It is only built through the mutual and voluntary donation of people, of the whole unrepeatable person: their who.

A surrender that should never be confused with sentimental tremors, nor, even less so, with the mere commerce of bodies.

Since this new kind of love, authentic love, emerges, what matters most, far above all else, is who you are. What you are—socially, economically, or culturally—and what you are like—more or less attractive, boisterous, intelligent, etc.—all become secondary.

When authentic love blossoms,
“what” you are and “how” you are
matter far less than “who” you are.

Intended for delivery

Authentic love has as its object or goal a unique and unrepeatable person, with a vocation for eternity, called to maintain forever an intimate dialogue of love with God and therefore wonderful and capable of giving full meaning to my own life.

And from there arises the mutual desire for personal commitment .

A desire that can be exemplified by this idealized, hypothetical, and somewhat corny dialogue between those who truly love each other:

I love you, and I would like to show it by giving you the best I have.
Well, the best thing you have and could give me is yourself.
Okay: I give you my life, I give you everything I am.
Well, I too, throughout my entire existence, will be all and only yours.

I give you my own person,
the most valuable thing I have,
the only truly valuable thing I have (and am).

Reiteration and reinforcement of the “personal” delivery through gifts

From then on, the gifts that lovers exchange tend to multiply.

But above all, they change their meaning.

They do not intend solely or primarily to serve as a means to ingratiate oneself with the other person, to dispose them favorably, to gain their appreciation, friendship and trust.

Deep down, although they often fail to realize it, these gifts are a symbol or a token of the reciprocal, anticipated, and desired surrender of themselves .

“Gift, present, offering? / Pure symbol, sign / that I want to give myself,” Salinas aptly wrote.

Or, in simpler words, which any passionate lover would readily agree with:

I wish I could live with you forever, but I can’t be in more than one place at a time, and my obligations often force us into physical separation.
Therefore, I leave you, so that it may always be with you, the most valuable thing I have ever found; and I give it to you with so much love that what is really in that gift is my very self!

The true gift of those who love each other
is always the “embodiment” of the person themselves.

Authentic or strictly personal love: between one person and another

All in the light of personal greatness

As can be seen, the key to the drastic change I have just suggested revolves around a fairly clear reality: the entry into force of strictly personal values , which authentic love always puts in the foreground.

Regardless of how it is reached and its more or less explicit and observable nature, at the beginning of self-giving love there is always the discovery of the person of the loved one, which in turn makes our most hidden personal fibers vibrate .

The attributes, even commendable ones, of the person who fascinates us no longer matter alone.

Authentic love arises from deeper within and goes beyond: it perceives with particular insight the unique personal greatness of the loved one.

It is as if the entire wonder of the condition of being a person —perfectissimum in tota natura : the most perfect thing (the “most perfect”) that can exist, as the classics said— were perceived with irresistible vigor embodied in a certain subject of the opposite sex, with whom one wishes to share one’s own existence.

As if that marvel of goodness and beauty, anchored in the incomparable nobility of his personal being , elevated to his sublime rank each and every member of the one we love:

their qualities, which had always attracted us,
but also its shortcomings and flaws,
- so that even these, by belonging to the beloved subject, are incorporated into the ineffable, compact and most intimate unity of the whole person and also become an object of love.

Authentic love
perceives with particular insight
the unique personal greatness of the loved one.

In authentic love, “everything” is magnified by the unique and unrepeatable character of the beloved person.

On the other hand, and this point also has practical implications, the physical or spiritual virtues that attracted us until then and continue to captivate us now, are marked by the unique and singular nature of the beloved person.

They cease to be common or similar to those of other individuals and, for that reason, the possibility and temptation to feel attracted to similar attributes of other people is attenuated almost to infinity:

Simply because by rooting them in the core of the personal condition, those of the one we love are noticed and are radically unique, without equal, and we could not find anything similar in a different subject, because there is nothing similar .

As Ortega recalls, .

Nothing immunizes a man against other sexual attractions as much as the loving enthusiasm for a particular woman.

Everything about the loved one is unique,
impossible to find in another person.

2. Authentic love, devotion, happiness

Free and voluntary surrender of the person

Authentic love takes us out of ourselves and leads us towards the other.

And there, in the direct and complete surrender of the person, lies the key to success.

While the derivative of simple attraction and feelings revolved somewhat around the self, tending to satisfy our desires to be with whomever we want, authentic or self-giving love radically reverses that state of affairs.

It takes us out of ourselves and leads us to recognize and want, through understanding and will, the good of the beloved: their most real and concrete good, not a generic good, blurred and confused among a cloud of romantic effluvia.

This way of loving, characteristic of marriage and often known as spousal or conjugal love, inevitably culminates in self-giving:

It leads to offering oneself to the other with total generosity, to putting oneself fully at their service, to giving one’s own whole person, also received unconditionally by the spouse.

It is not just pleasure, nor just affection, nor emotional resonance. It is about giving the greatest thing we have, our own personal self, which is what the other, more or less consciously, desires and in any case needs: not what we desire and need to give them, and which therefore pleases us.

The deep and lasting joy, the effect of love in its highest sense, of authentic love, is born precisely from this endless and gratuitous surrender: carried out not with a view to a certain interest or enjoyment, always ephemeral, but to the perfection and happiness of the other, to their definitive personal aggrandizement.

Love derived from attraction and feelings
revolves around oneself;
authentic love (of giving)
makes us attentive to the loved one.

A love that is difficult to understand today

Romantic love or selfless love…

How can we better grasp the difference between these two ways of loving? How can we truly understand that true love always leads to self-giving, to altruistic self-sacrifice, above and beyond enjoyment and self-satisfaction, while still encompassing them whenever possible?

Perhaps today it is not easy, due to various factors that should be considered.

Namely:

that ours is largely a society tinged with egocentric individualism, which makes everything revolve around oneself;
which is also permeated with utilitarianism or the desire to extract an individual benefit from everything we do;
that this crystallizes into a “use and throw away” civilization or, as has been authoritatively written, into “a civilization of things and not of people , a civilization in which people are used as if they were things”;
And that in such a context, that of “the civilization of pleasure, woman can become an object for man, children an obstacle for parents, the family an institution that hinders the freedom of its members.”

In a culture marked by individualism and hedonism,
it is almost impossible for authentic love to take root.

A happiness almost impossible to achieve

In a world with this type of personal relationships, the well-deserved satisfaction of sincere love tends to disappear, and with it, love itself.

As evidenced by the overcrowded waiting rooms of psychiatrists, among other indicators, today’s culture, laden with threats to an excessively exalted and protected self, can deteriorate those who submit to it and ultimately breeds weariness, disenchantment, indifference, apathy, and misfortune.

On the contrary, happiness is linked to the perfection of the person; it is like its corollary or resonance in the subject.

And no one improves as a person except to the extent that he loves with the love of his will and, by bringing that way of loving to its fullness, he gives himself, making the aggrandizement and happiness of the other —in our case, of the spouse— the vocation and the meaning of his own existence.

Hence, the happiness of any marriage is directly proportional to the mutual commitment of those who make it up: to the decision, depth and vigor with which they love each other .

Happiness is directly and exclusively proportional
to the depth and vigor with which one loves,
provided it is authentic love.

Love and only love

And that, regardless of the circumstances that some sectors of present-day civilization so emphatically propose as an unavoidable requirement for happiness: health, money, availability of time and means of entertainment, increasingly elaborate experiences…

Some of the best sequences in the now classic Shadowlands , in which the grandeur and fullness of love stand out against the backdrop of death, manage to convey this with exquisite restraint.

Our Fray Luis de León , in turn, expressed it with a touch of serene poetry:

In the same way that a man is rich who has a precious emerald or a precious diamond, even if he has nothing else, and possessing this stone is not possessing this stone, but possessing in it a treasure in abbreviated form;
Thus, a good woman is not a woman, but a pile of riches, and whoever possesses her is rich with her alone, and only she can make him blessed and happy.

Just like a good husband to his wife.

Men and women
become mutually happy
when they truly love each other.

Not infatuation,
but authentic or self-giving love
is capable of sustaining a marriage
and making spouses happy.

(To be continued)

Tomás Melendo / Lourdes Millán,
President and Vice President of Edufamilia
http://www.edufamilia.com
[email protected]

EduFamilia

Edufamilia es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro, nacida en el año 2005. Su fundador, Tomás Melendo, advirtió que una mejora en la calidad de las familias facilitaría la resolución de bastantes de los problemas que aquejan a la sociedad de hoy. Y, apoyado siempre por su mujer, decidió lanzarse a esta aventura que cuenta con casi veinte años de vida y con múltiples ediciones de los distintos cursos formativos: Másteres y Maestrías, Expertos, cursos más breves, conferencias, ciclos culturales, seminarios y otros programas educativos. Aunque las primeras ediciones tuvieron carácter presencial, actualmente se ha hecho un gran esfuerzo por promover la infraestructura virtual para adaptarse a los nuevos tiempos y que la formación en torno a la familia alcance al mundo entero.