“However much other kinds of love may satisfy the Platonic, charitable, compassionate kinds of love, and however much one must enjoy a measure of love from his family and his fellowmen, a little love from many – to be really happy, and to find true joy, it is crucial that we have the complete, unshared, fully expressed love of one.”
“A boy ought to love a girl. He ought to desire with all the desire a life’s companion. He ought to love fully and completely and righteously. He ought to be preoccupied with finding a sweetheart, and having found her, to love her. Permanently. This power, this yearning to love, and to be loved is something so magnetic, so powerful, and so compelling, and so important, that it is not to be ignored.
“Young people sometimes get the mistaken notion that the religious attitude and spirituality interferes with the experience of love. They assume that the requirements of the church are interferences and aggravations which thwart the full expression of love. Oh youth, if you could know: the requirements of the church are the highway to love. With guardrails securely in place, with guide-signs plainly marked, with help along the way. How foolish is the youth who feels that the church is a fence around love to keep him out. How unfortunate to resent counsel and restraint. How fortunate the young person who follows the standards of the church, even if just from sheer obedience or habit, for he will find a rapture, and a joy fulfilled.
“You are at an age now as college students when there is a compelling urgency for you to be complete. You want to find the fulfillment in life that you know you cannot find alone. The powers that awakened earlier in your lives have been growing. You have been responding to them, probably very clumsily. But they now form themselves into a restlessness that cannot be ignored. You are old enough now to fall in love. Not the puppy love of elementary years, not the confused love of the teens, but the full blown love of eligible men and women, newly matured, ready for life. Romantic love, with all the full intense meaning of the word, with all of the power, turbulence and frustration, the yearning, the restraining, and all of the peace and beauty and sublimity of love. No experience can be more beautiful. No power more compelling, more exquisite, or if misused, no suffering more excruciating than that connected with love.
“The day comes… when that source [of love] is no longer available. A young person may develop the ability to provide for himself this vital necessity of living. Not only will that source of love be gone, but then a new kind of love becomes necessary. In our youth we learn to relate to other people, earning little amounts of love and affection and friendship by bestowing them on others. When we have reached college age, it is assumed that we are prepared to find love for ourselves in order that our lives may be normal, full and rewarding.
“The question is, ‘do you want her as the mother of your children.’”
“The power of love between man and woman is not completely defined, but like electricity, it can be used and controlled and directed even though we don’t know exactly what it is. We know that love has the power to create – think of that, just think of that – love has the power to create life. When a wife and a husband live together in love, the product of the most exalted and most sacred expression of love is life itself. Children are born out of love."
- Boyd K Packer
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