demands that women, to be fulfilled, become like men?
Women need men to be men; not brutish caricatures of men, but lovers of
truth, possessors of wisdom. In fact, women need men to be men in order that
they may be women – since the essence of womanhood is conjugial love, which
inspires a longing for marriage with a man.
And men need women to be women, in order that the truth men love may
not be just dry theory, or lapse into the irrationality of self-intelligence, but be
joined with good, and thus made warm, living, perceptive and fruitful.
Physically, people appear to be at their most masculine or feminine in
their early adulthood; but the spiritual qualities of masculinity and femininity
represented in the strength and beauty of youth can continue to grow
throughout life in this world and even to eternity in heaven.
The two essential qualities that make us human, love and wisdom – which
we receive from our Creator, in whom they are perfectly united in a Divine
marriage – are received in a distinctly different way by men and women. This is
why there are two sexes, and only two. This is why they can be so wonderfully
conjoined. And it is why there is no end to that conjunction.
To be human is to be male or female. “Male and female created He
them.” And the supreme expression of each sex is when it is joined with its
complement. “For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and be
joined to his wife: and the two shall become one flesh.” (Matthew 19:5) A man
in full is a husband, a woman in full is a wife.
The beauty of this is that everyone can become ever more fully and
distinctly masculine or feminine to eternity; more a husband or more a wife.
And thus more and more united into one angel; an ever more perfect image
and likeness of God, in whom Love and Wisdom make One. The potential for
this is present from our birth, in the way our minds and even our very souls
are formed – that is, as male or female.
In a marriage of truly conjugial love, each partner becomes more and more deeply
human, for that love opens the deeper aspects of their minds, and as these are
opened, a person becomes more and more human. To become more human is, on
the part of a wife, to become more a wife; and on the part of a husband, to become
more a husband.
A wife becomes more and more a wife as her husband becomes more and more a
husband; however, not so much the reverse. The reason, they said, is that a chaste
wife rarely if ever fails to love her husband, but what fails is her being loved by
her husband in return. They also said that this failure is attributable to a lack of
elevation in his wisdom, which alone receives the love of a wife.
(Conjugial Love 200)
Note those last three sentences. Conjugial love will continue to flow into
the hearts of wives, but it needs to be able to find what that love desires in
husbands who value and seek spiritual, rational and moral wisdom. Young
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