Pope Francis on Annulments

From Tumblar House:

When you are intimate with someone too soon in a relationship, you are, to a certain degree, playing Russian roulette with your heart. Though young adults are often forewarned about the risk of disease or pregnancy, they are seldom told about the permanent effect that sexual relations outside of marriage will have on their heart. 

In deciding to conjugate outside of marriage, two things can happen. You can either effectively numb your heart, so you do not feel the emotions that naturally accompany the physical act of love, or you can allow your heart to feel the emotions and fall in love (or think you have fallen in love) with the person with whom you share sexual intimacy. Either way, you are changing the state of your heart, for it is impossible to un-know something once it becomes known. 

Indeed, it is evident that the first instance is harmful to one’s emotional well-being since one can easily perceive how making this a habit over time will eventually harden the heart. No human being has succeeded at reducing what was meant to be an exquisitely beautiful, physical expression of love to casual amusement without incurring deep-seated emotional wounds. 

The second instance is a bit more involved. When you give yourself to someone without really knowing him or her well enough - although sometimes you may think you do - the intense feelings you are having may deceive you into believing that you are closer, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, to that person than you actually are. Emotions greatly impact your thoughts and feelings. 

Sometimes you may even project desirable attributes onto that person to compensate for what you do not know about them. You construct delusions of grandeur, a fantasy in your mind, of what you wish the relationship to be. (Read more.)

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