70. Conjugial love comes down from the marriage of good and truth

It became known to me from long experience that no one has conjugial love unless he is in the love of truth from good, and in the love of good by means of truth, that is, in the heavenly marriage; and that he cannot be in any mutual love of good and truth unless he shuns adultery and loathes it like hell. This holds even for those who have lived in marriage in the world and have loved their wife for the sake of cohabitation, the pleasure of life on earth for the sake of children. For celestial things ought to flow into conjugial love, and man comes into his celestial and spiritual things after death, and then becomes completely as he was formerly in that respect; it cannot be otherwise.

The number "two" has two different meanings in the Bible. In most cases "two" indicates a joining together or unification. This is easy to see if we consider the conflicts we tend to have between our "hearts" and our "heads" -- between what we want and what we know. Our "hearts" tell us that we want pie with ice cream for dinner; our "heads" tell us we should have grilled chicken and salad. If we can bring those two together and actually want what's good for us, we'll be pretty happy. We're built that way -- with our emotions balanced against our intellect -- because the Lord is built that way. His essence is love itself, or Divine Love, the source of all caring, emotion and energy. It is expressed as Divine Wisdom, which gives form to that love and puts it to work, and is the source of all knowledge and reasoning. In His case the two aspects are always in conjunction, always in harmony. It's easy also to see how that duality is reflected throughout creation: plants and animals, food and drink, silver and gold. Most importantly, it's reflected in the two genders, with women representing love and men representing wisdom. That's the underlying reason why conjunction in marriage is such a holy thing. So when "two" is used in the Bible to indicate some sort of pairing or unity, it means a joining together. In rare cases, however, "two" is used more purely as a number. In these cases it stands for a profane or unholy state that comes before a holy one. This is because "three" represents a state of holiness and completion (Jesus, for instance, rose from the tomb on the third day), and "two" represents the state just before it.