This letter confused me a little. It almost seemed as if Lewis was suggesting marriage have nothing to do with love, which I heartily disagreed with. Was I confused by the worldly view of love today? I looked up marriage in my handy, dandy concordance, and there really wasn't much scripture about prerequisites to marriage. So, I remain confused. On to the letter:
This letter discusses falling in love. Screwtape points out that God wants either abstinence from us or complete monogamy in marriage. Screwtape discloses that the devils have made monogamy (staying with just one person) very difficult. The devils have done this by promoting the idea of "falling in love." He (Screwtape) explains that falling in love is a short term excitement that he wants humans to think should last forever. If that feeling of excitement doesn't last forever (which it won't) then a marriage should end.
I think the first point C.S. Lewis is trying to make in this letter is that the expectation that a long term relationship will have the giddiness of falling in love is not possible. That God describes marriage as "one flesh." God did not say marriage was a happy married couple or a couple that married because they fell in love, at least not in the way we define falling in love today. God created marriage so man and women could help each other, so they would not be lonely. Marriage does include love, but not the giddy kind of love we expect today, it has more of the enduring steadfast love. By expecting the excitement of new love to last throughout a lifetime will only produce disappointment.
The devils in this letter explain that they can use the idea of "falling in love" to tempt man to do many things. We will see exactly how this is done in the following letters.
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