“If You Don’t Love Her Soul, Don’t Get Married”: Dr Peter Kreeft’s Viral Marriage Advice

This week, a short clip from a popular Catholic podcast stopped over nine million people mid-scroll.

On Pints with Aquinas, host Matt Fradd asked 89-year-old US professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King’s College Dr Peter Kreeft a fairly ordinary question: what advice would he give someone who’s newly married, or about to be?

His answer was anything but ordinary.

“Do you think that when you are very old, and your wife is very old, and ugly, and wrinkled, and fat, and not very bright, or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful? If so, marry her.”

Out of context, it’s a line that could sound almost harsh. In context, it’s something closer to a witness statement – proof of a man’s unconditional love for his wife, tested not in the easy years but the hardest ones. Dr Kreeft wasn’t speaking hypothetically. Only two weeks earlier, his wife of 63 years, Maria Antoinette, had died at 85.

“The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home, about an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again,” he said.

“Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body. It’s as beautiful as a crucifix, ’cause that body ain’t going to last, but the soul is. So if you don’t love her soul but just love her body, don’t get married.”

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Most of us fall in love with someone at their best – young, healthy, easy to be around. Dr Kreeft’s advice flips that test entirely: can you picture loving this person once all of that is gone, and love them anyway?

“If you don’t love her soul but just love her body, don’t get married.” – Dr Peter Kreeft

It’s a confronting standard. It’s also, for a culture that often treats attraction as the whole foundation of a relationship, a genuinely radical one. What Dr Kreeft points out is a truth Christians have always claimed but rarely had to live out so publicly: that we are more than just a body. We are body and soul.

In a world that demands we stay young and beautiful for as long as possible, the Christian message has always run the other way: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).

Why the clip struck such a nerve

The clip has been viewed over 9.5 million times and shared 294,000 times on Matt Fradd’s official Instagram page, with public figures reacting not just to his words but to Fradd’s emotional response: silence and tears.

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But there’s a deeper reason it landed the way it did. We don’t see many public witnesses to long marriages anymore. Celebrity relationships move in and out of the headlines so quickly that it’s easy to forget marriage was ever meant to be a lifelong commitment. Hearing an elderly man speak plainly about what that actually requires cuts through in a way polished advice never could.

And what he required wasn’t perfection. Reflecting later in the interview, Dr Kreeft said, “I’ve written over a hundred books, and the most important book I ever wrote was my marriage. That was my primary vocation. She has been the best thing in my life, the most important thing in my life – and we finished the book, and it has been a success”.

“The round peg and the square hole met, and they married. Although we had a lot of ups and downs, we ended on a high note, and the book went home to the printer.”

“The most important book I ever wrote was my marriage.”

He never claimed it was easy. He didn’t shy away from the hardships, or the suffering at the end. But he did call it a triumph.

“I remember riding home in the car from the nursing home where she died, and of course, I was weeping. And suddenly God reminded me that this was a triumph. This was not a defeat. And I said, ‘Hey kiddo, we made it.’ And the tears turned into wild laughter.”

Dr Kreeft spent 63 years learning what his advice took thirty seconds to say. Most of us won’t get that long to learn it. Nobody gets a say in how long love lasts. But his marriage is proof of what it looks like when you give it everything you have.

You can watch the full interview on Pints with Aquinas.

This article was researched and prepared by staff writers, with assistance from AI in its presentation. Final review and fact-checking were undertaken by our Digital Team prior to publication. 

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