Marriage is not a game

Valentine's Day is an exhausting date - what's the point? In a way, this romantic-emotional weariness is contributed to by the hypercorazonization of the consumer offer that has turned the so-called Valentine's Day into an embarrassing date.

Reducing love to a box of chocolates is symptomatic: it will expire, run out or even “throw away what we don't like”, like the dark chocolate and rum chocolates that always end up in the trash with the box.

A few years ago, with the laudable idea of “redirecting” this vision of love, the EEC began to promote, on these February dates, the Marriage Week. The aim is to invite you to discover -or rediscover- this wonderful, funny, complicated and sometimes a little bit «trashy» adventure of the marriage, Because there must be everything in a shared life based on love, admiration, respect and the determination to build the future together through our family.

In these years we have seen good campaigns, in which couples of all ages shared their experiences or in which we have seen “adaptations” of the formats of realities more or less fun.

This year, however, the surprise has been a “game”The aim is to “offer an authentic vocational campaign” that “enters into dialogue with the gamified society in which we live and, at the same time, makes it possible and simple to reflect on the deep and essential elements in the gift of human love, necessary for the marriage that satisfies the yearning for happiness of the human heart”.

On the one hand, the effort to innovate in an area in which, as the magnificent dialogue between Frank and Colleen in Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), it's all made up.

On the other hand, this need to “gamify” or take as a game something key in the life of every human being, and even more so of every Catholic, such as marriage, is astonishing.

No military officer is promoted in his career because of his exploits in the Call of Duty; no player signs for Real Madrid with the endorsement of his points in the FIFA; and I promise you that, no matter how good you are at the Mario Kart, they do not validate your driver's license.

The Church has all the “skills”It can offer society the keys to this magnificent adventure that is marriage: to reinforce good affective education in its schools, to accompany married couples at all stages of their lives by adapting to the vicissitudes of a chaotic world. It can promote a real renewal of the premarital courses, make of the family pastoral a focus of creativity and not a “hiding place”, ally itself with new realities that, whether or not of our profile, work in favor of a marital renewal... etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

Marriage is a lot of fun, as we are well reminded. Pep Borrell, But it is also something very serious, so much so that we stake EVERYTHING on it. And no. It is not a game.