Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology Brent Slife contrasted his enduring relationship to his wife Karen with cultural ideas about love and relationships during the forum on May 16.
Slife is the 56th recipient of the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award, BYU’s more prestigious faculty award. He serves as the President of the Board of Directors of Center Point Church, the largest Protestant church in Utah Valley, and said he felt especially blessed to be receiving the award as a non-Mormon.
“This university has insisted on valuing me regardless of my religious minority status,” Slife said. “I am a religious ‘other’ and yet this university has not only accepted me as a colleague and friend but persisted in recognizing me and celebrating my work.”
Slife said while psychologists rarely speak from personal experience and rely on objective data, his love for his wife Karen would be the focus of his remarks. Slife described how the subjective nature of love has caused it to remain an elusive topic of study for psychologists over the years.
Slife said his love for his wife has grown throughout their marriage, rather than faded, and this typifies the experience of many.
“My purpose today is not to romanticize this type of love,” Slife said. “Instead, my desire is to understand it, at least to some degree.”
Slife continues to operate a psychotherapy practice after over 35 years, where he specializes in marital and family therapy. A stronger understanding of why and how love endures would lend to his practice.
“Why is my marriage thriving while other marriages are dying?” Slife said.
Slife said one of the major problems plaguing marriages is egoistic behavior, in which all motives and goals are oriented toward self-benefit.
“Egoism assumes that we’re all ultimately watching out for No. 1,” Slife said.
By contrast, Slife said he finds his behavior with his wife to be almost entirely unselfish.
“My point here is that conventional explanations could not predict or even render as plausible my loving behaviors,” Slife said.
Slife said a second problem facing marriages is the idea of otherness — a cultural view that differences in others are automatically bad.
While “otherness” frequently points to problems in his clients’ relationships, Slife said his own marriage contradicts these ideas. He said the differences in his relationship are often its most enjoyable parts.
“Unlike most secular understandings of relationships, I experience my love for her not in spite of our otherness, but because of it,” Slife said.
Slife said the early ideas of French philosopher Rene Descartes prevail in today’s society, in which many people use marriage as a means to individual happiness. One key to an enduring love is treating a relationship as an end, not as a means to personal rewards, according to Slife.
Slife referenced another French philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, who described love as a “saturated experience.”
“Saturation occurs when an experience touches us so deeply that we can’t explain or even fathom it,” Slife said. “Here Marion hits the nail on the head for me. My experience of Karen’s love is so luminous and so glorious that it feels unearthly.”
Slife said unlike the Cartesian approach, in which everyone must deserve the love they receive from the benefits they provide, love from Marion’s perspective cannot be controlled through reciprocal benefit and is never truly deserved or justified.
He said Marion’s ‘gracious love’ is the reason people are so tongue-tied when they try to explain or justify their love for each other, and the reason they rely on poems and songs to express love.
The only appropriate, realistic response to a saturated experience, such as gracious love, is a profound honoring and appreciation for it — commonly referred to as the term “blessed”, according to Slife.
“Gracious love, then, is so ‘other,’ so above and beyond, that it doesn’t fit our stereotype or representation of the world,” Slife said. “It throws us; it knocks us off our egoistic thrones as controllers of our own little universe.“
Slife said the feeling of being knocked off base by love is the reason people feel so vulnerable when faced with love.
He said his relationship with Karen is part of his identity and helps to constitute who he is. Over the years, their ‘otherness’ gave way to a saturated sense of unity and oneness. Slife said the world would be a different place if everyone aspired to this type of love.
“You all know about the old couple who finish each other’s sentences,” Slife said. “Marion puts it this way, ‘I am only insofar as I love, and am loved.'”
