Series Introduction--It Takes Three (Posts on Christian Love, Sex, and Marriage)

A quick note about this username, Speranza: I used to have another blog that was associated with my primary email account, and while it's now defunct, rather than add a new blog to the same email when I created 'Forgetting the Cat', I felt inexplicably compelled to make a whole new email/google profile. I have no idea why I did this--I guess it didn't occur to me that I could just add a blog. :-p Anyhow, for the sake of convenience, I added my old profile to this blog, so both profiles that contribute to it are 'me', Meghan. Now, onward.
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One of the Patheos bloggers a few of my non-Catholic friends share on Facebook from time to time is 'Sarah Over the Moon'. She has a series of posts called the 'You Are Not Your Own' series, which focuses on what she considers to be an innate Christian premise present in the understanding of gender/gender roles/marriage--specifically as found in many popular Christian dating books--that invites and tolerates rape and abuse.

I don't really want to go through her posts serially and respond to them, nor would I argue with her 100%, since I'm sure there are some women who misunderstand the message of Christian marital relationships.  But I would like to try and post a kind of general series-length response that dispels some common myths about Christian relationships, and covers some authentic truths about Christian love and marriage, maybe to help clarify what is heard versus what is actually said/actually meant.

I feel like the most common sense approach to this extremely broad, extremely inclusive topic is perhaps to choose a common myth each post, and respond to it directly as well as by providing the contrasting and more accurate reality.

I've chosen the title/theme of 'It Takes Three' to illustrate as succinctly as possible one of the most fundamental diseases that afflicts love and marriage today.  It comes from the Fulton Sheen quote that says:

“It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.” 

Look for the first post before the end of the weekend. :)