94. 6. A love for the opposite sex is a love of the external or natural man, and is therefore common to every animal. Everybody is born carnal and becomes more and more inwardly natural, and to the extent that he loves intelligence he becomes rational, and afterwards, if he loves wisdom, he becomes spiritual. (We will say later, in no. 130, what that wisdom is, by which a person becomes spiritual.)

Now as a person advances from knowledge to intelligence, and from this to wisdom, his mind also changes its form accordingly, for it opens up more and more and becomes more closely connected with heaven and through heaven with the Lord. Consequently the person becomes a greater lover of truth and more devoted to goodness of life.

If a person stops, therefore, at the first stage in his progress towards wisdom, the form of his mind remains natural, and it receives the inflowing of the universal atmosphere - the atmosphere of the marriage between good and truth - in just the same way as it is received by the lower members of the animal kingdom called beasts and birds. And because these are merely natural, the person becomes like them, and consequently he feels a love for the opposite sex in the same way they do.

This is what we mean by the statement that a love for the opposite sex is a love of the external or natural man, and is therefore common to every animal.

213. 3. In the case of people who are in a state of truly conjugial love, their happiness in living together increases, but with those who are not in a state of conjugial love, it decreases. Their happiness in living together increases in the case of those who are in a state of truly conjugial love, because they love each other with their every power of sensation. The wife sees nothing more lovable than her husband, and the husband nothing more lovable than her. Indeed, neither do they hear, smell or touch anything more lovable than each other. From this comes their happiness in living together and sharing house, bedroom, and bed.

You who are married men can confirm for yourselves that this is so from the first delights of marriage, which are then felt in their fullness; because at that time, of all the opposite sex, a husband loves his wife alone.

Everyone knows that the reverse is the case with those who do not possess any conjugial love.