287. We can also tell that love and wisdom are human by looking at heaven's angels, who are people in full beauty to the extent that they are caught up in love, and therefore in wisdom, from the Lord. The same conclusion follows from what it says in the Word about Adam's being created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), because he was created in the form of love and wisdom.

All earthly individuals are born in the human form as to their physical bodies. This is because our spirit, which is also called our soul, is a person; and it is a person because it is receptive of love and wisdom from the Lord. To the extent that our spirit or soul actually accepts love and wisdom, we become human after the death of these material bodies that we are carrying around. To the extent that we do not accept love and wisdom we become grotesque creatures, retaining some trace of humanity because of our ability to accept them.

214. 4. In the case of people who are in a state of truly conjugial love, their union of minds increases, and with it, their friendship, but with those who are not in a state of conjugial love, these both decrease. We have already shown that a union of minds increases in the case of those who are in a state of truly conjugial love, in the chapter in which we took up "The Conjunction of Souls and Minds by Marriage, Meant by the Lord's Saying that They are No Longer Two But One Flesh" (see nos. 156[r]-181).

[2] This union grows, moreover, as friendship is joined to love, because friendship is, so to speak, the face of that love and also its garment; for friendship both attaches itself to love like a garment and combines itself with it like a face.

Love prior to friendship is similar to love for any of the opposite sex, and after the wedding it gradually fades. But love combined with friendship continues on after the wedding and is also strengthened. It enters as well more deeply into the breast. Friendship introduces the love and causes it to be truly conjugial; and then the love in turn causes this, its friendship, to become also conjugial - a friendship which differs greatly from that of any other love, because it is a full one.

[3] People know that the opposite happens in the case of those who do not have conjugial love. In their case the first friendship that was inspired in them at the time of their betrothal and later during the first days after their wedding, more and more ebbs from the inner recesses of their minds and gradually subsides from there until it finally departs to the surface coverings of the skin. And in the case of those who contemplate separation, it entirely disappears. With those who do not contemplate separation, however, love remains in outward appearances, but inwardly it is cold.