True love (but for real)

I don't have anything brilliant to add to this saintly wisdom. Even if I did, I wouldn't say it as well. This is from Karol Wojtyla's "Love and Responsibility" (written before he became pope, and a solid foundation upon which was built his "Theology of the Body"). Much of the first part of the book talks about different types of love, and asserts that attraction and affection are not sinful, or even inferior types of love, just incomplete, as they are meant to lead us to a more complete love.

In this part, he speaks especially towards sexual attraction as a key component for betrothed love (he even goes so far as to say betrothed love is not possible without it), but that it grows into a more authentic love as it points towards the value of the person as a whole. Read carefully. And then read it again.

"True love, a love that is internally complete, is one in which we choose the person for the sake of the person, -that in which a man chooses a woman or a woman chooses a man not just as a sexual 'partner' but as the person on whom to bestow the gift of his or her own life. 'Sexual' values, vibrantly present in their sensual and emotional reactions, contribute to the decision and make it a more intense psychological experience, but it is not they which determine its authenticity."

"We are bound to recognize that the choice of a person of the other sex as the object of betrothed love, and a the co-creator of that love by way of reciprocity, must depend to a certain extent on sexual values...[but] the choice of a person is a process in which sexual values cannot function as the sole motive, or even - if we analyze this act of will thoroughly - as the primary motive."

"So that if we consider the whole process by which a man chooses a woman or a woman a man, we can say that it is set in motion by recognition of and reaction to sexual values but that in the last analysis, each chooses the sexual values because they belong to a person, and not the person because of his or her sexual values."

This guy knows what he's talking about