Being in Love and Marriage

Being in Love and Marriage is Screwtape’s analysis of how romantic feeling can be mistaken for the foundation of marriage, and how that mistake can turn an intense but temporary state into a standard that married people cannot sustain. He contrasts the demonic ideal of competing, separate selves with a Christian understanding of fidelity and shared life. In his account, the danger is not simply passion: it is treating passion as proof of virtue, a guarantee of happiness, or an excuse to evade the responsibilities of marriage.

Romantic Feeling and Marriage

Screwtape presents human sexuality as part of a larger contest between two accounts of relationship. Hell’s philosophy assumes that one self’s gain is another’s loss; it treats existence as competition and the stronger will as entitled to absorb the weaker. The Enemy’s opposing principle is that distinct people can be joined in love without being erased. Screwtape regards the family, with its bonds of affection and responsibility between parents and children, as a particularly troublesome expression of that principle.

Against this background, he describes marriage as a dilemma the Enemy sets before humans: abstinence or monogamy. Since abstinence has been made difficult, Hell works to make monogamy seem viable only when based on the unusual excitement called being in love. The cultural error, as Screwtape frames it, is to expect marriage to make that excitement permanent and to regard a marriage without it as no longer binding. The experience may precede a marriage consistent with fidelity and good will, but that does not make the feeling the source of those obligations.

Screwtape invokes the description of a married couple as “one flesh” to distinguish a consequential bond from a passing emotion. As he presents the argument, the phrase does not describe only couples who marry happily or because they are in love. Sexual union establishes a relation whose significance does not depend on whether the participants welcome it. The confusion follows when people take a real potential result of marriage—affection and family—and mistake the emotional blend they call being in love for the condition that makes marriage valid or holy.

The Uses of Romantic Ideals

The ideal that love alone justifies marriage produces two strategic advantages for Hell. First, people who do not experience romantic excitement may be discouraged from marrying even when they lack the gift of continence. Loyalty, mutual assistance, chastity, and the transmission of life can then seem cold or cynical beside a storm of emotion. Second, sexual infatuation can be elevated into love simply because it points toward marriage, allowing the feeling to excuse a choice of partner regardless of whether that person is suitable or shares the faith.

Screwtape refuses to classify being in love as automatically good or bad. What matters is the direction a particular state of mind takes a particular person in particular circumstances. An arrogant person who mistakes distaste for the body for purity may be steered toward contempt for love and an exaggerated asceticism; once sexuality is separated from what might humanize it, it can be redirected in a harsher and more cynical form. An emotionally susceptible person, by contrast, can be taught that love is irresistible and inherently meritorious. Screwtape says that this ideal can encourage prolonged adulteries imagined as noble and tragic, or help steer someone toward a marriage that makes Christian life difficult. The same emotional state is therefore an opportunity for competing influences, not a moral verdict in itself.

The distinction between feeling and commitment also reveals why Screwtape wants humans to misunderstand what marriage promises. Romantic intensity may accompany a marriage entered in fidelity and good will, just as religious emotion may accompany conversion, but Screwtape treats such intensity as something that can be confused with the outcome it sometimes precedes. If excitement is mistaken for the basis of marriage, its disappearance can seem to invalidate the relationship rather than expose the need for durable commitment.

Courtship and the Trap of Selflessness

Screwtape identifies courtship as a time when conflicts can be postponed rather than solved. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire makes the couple’s mutual willingness to yield look like charity. By exploiting the ambiguity of love, Hell can persuade them that affection has settled problems which remain unresolved; meanwhile, the problems are allowed to grow chronic beneath the temporary harmony.

The letters connect this confusion to a distorted ideal of unselfishness. Screwtape contrasts the positive practice of charity with the negative project of proving oneself unselfish. A person who gives something up chiefly to secure that self-image is not necessarily seeking the other person’s happiness. The distortion becomes especially divisive when men and women attach different meanings to selflessness: one may emphasize taking trouble for others, while another understands it as avoiding trouble for them. Each can then regard the other as selfish while believing that their own standard is reasonable.

During romantic enchantment, each partner may genuinely enjoy giving way. Screwtape’s proposed trap is to turn that temporary readiness into a law for the whole marriage. The couple mistakes sexual excitement for charity and assumes the excitement will endure; when it fades, they may lack the developed charity needed to maintain the sacrifices they have made obligatory. In later disagreements, each can argue against their own apparent wishes in the name of the other, while concealing what they actually want. The result, in Screwtape’s scheme, is often a decision neither wants, accompanied by self-righteousness, a claim to preferential treatment, and resentment toward the other for accepting the sacrifice.

A Contingent State, Not a Guaranteed Good

The correspondence’s account of romance is deliberately instrumental: Screwtape asks not whether love is good in the abstract, but what it is doing to a particular person. He imagines using either rejection of love or idealization of it, depending on the person’s disposition, and even considers marriage useful when it could hinder the patient’s Christian life. His advice thus exposes the difference between a feeling’s intensity and its moral direction.

The argument also belongs to the letters’ broader contest between incorporation and freely given relationship. Hell seeks to absorb another will and treats one person’s good as a loss to someone else; the Enemy, in Screwtape’s hostile description, seeks unity without the erasure of distinct selves. Marriage, as these letters frame it, is consequently more than a romantic reward. Its significance lies in the enduring relation and responsibilities that feeling may accompany but cannot guarantee. Screwtape’s own account is a demonic strategy, not a neutral authority: the foreword warns that he is a liar and that even his descriptions may reflect Hell’s wishful thinking. His analysis therefore reveals both the temptations he hopes to exploit and the limits of his competitive account of love.