The myth of the love-vow had a lasting influence on Western culture. [...] Other societies have viewed love, desire and marriage in other terms, and the idea of marriage as rooted in a personal choice is as foreign to oriental traditions as the love of counterpoint, the belief in the Incarnation or a taste for confit d'oie.
It is hard to disagree with all that. Yet there is something that it overlooks, something which is at the heart of the medieval conception of the love vow, and of the marital practices that it has been used to authorize. This thing is the peculiar intentionality of human sexual emotion. Sexual desire is not a desire for sensations. It is a desire for a person: and I mean a person, not his or her body, conceived as an object in the physical world, but the person conceived as an incarnate subject, in whom the light of self-consciousness shines and who confronts me eye to eye, and I to I. True desire is a kind of petition: it demands reciprocity, mutuality and a shared surrender. It is, therefore, compromising, and also threatening. No pursuit of a mere sensation could be compromising or threatening in this way.
These are not claims about culture, nor are they claims about the way in which desire has been rationalised, idealized or constrained by institutions. They are claims about a particular state of mind, one that only rational beings can experience, and which, nevertheless, has its roots in our embodiment as members of the human species.
Roger Scruton "The Meaning of Marriage" 2006
Love is a matter of desiring the persona of the loved one as it is. It is most emphatically not a matter of selfishly manipulating the persona of the other to match one's demands, needs and preconceptions; that is merely a subtle kind of rape.
Roberta Holzmann "A Sceptical Feminism" 1987
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