Marriage and Family Life

84:6.1The re­pro­duc­tive urge un­fail­ingly brings men and women to­gether for self-per­pet­u­a­tion but, alone, does not in­sure their re­main­ing to­gether in mu­tual co-op­er­a­tion—the found­ing of a home.

84:6.2Ev­ery suc­cess­ful hu­man in­sti­tu­tion em­braces an­tag­o­nisms of per­sonal in­ter­est which have been ad­justed to prac­ti­cal work­ing har­mony, and home­mak­ing is no ex­cep­tion. Mar­riage, the ba­sis of home build­ing, is the high­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of that an­tag­o­nis­tic co-op­er­a­tion which so of­ten char­ac­ter­izes the con­tacts of na­ture and so­ci­ety. The con­flict is in­ev­i­ta­ble. Mat­ing is in­her­ent; it is nat­u­ral. But mar­riage is not bi­o­logic; it is so­ci­o­logic. Pas­sion in­sures that man and woman will come to­gether, but the weaker pa­ren­tal in­stinct and the so­cial mores hold them to­gether.

84:6.3Male and fe­male are, prac­ti­cally re­garded, two dis­tinct va­ri­eties of the same species liv­ing in close and in­ti­mate as­so­ci­a­tion. Their view­points and en­tire life re­ac­tions are es­sen­tially dif­fer­ent; they are wholly in­ca­pable of full and real com­pre­hen­sion of each other. Com­plete un­der­stand­ing be­tween the sexes is not at­tain­able.

84:6.4Women seem to have more in­tu­ition than men, but they also ap­pear to be some­what less log­i­cal. Woman, how­ever, has al­ways been the moral stan­dard-bearer and the spir­i­tual leader of man­kind. The hand that rocks the cra­dle still frat­er­nizes with des­tiny.

84:6.5The dif­fer­ences of na­ture, re­ac­tion, view­point, and think­ing be­tween men and women, far from oc­ca­sion­ing con­cern, should be re­garded as highly ben­e­fi­cial to man­kind, both in­di­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively. Many or­ders of uni­verse crea­tures are cre­ated in dual phases of per­son­al­ity man­i­fes­ta­tion. Among mor­tals, Ma­te­rial Sons, and mid­soniters, this dif­fer­ence is de­scribed as male and fe­male; among ser­a­phim, cheru­bim, and Mor­ontia Com­pan­ions, it has been de­nom­i­nated pos­i­tive or ag­gres­sive and neg­a­tive or re­tir­ing. Such dual as­so­ci­a­tions greatly mul­ti­ply ver­sa­til­ity and over­come in­her­ent lim­i­ta­tions, even as do cer­tain tri­une as­so­ci­a­tions in the Par­a­dise-Ha­vona sys­tem.

84:6.6Men and women need each other in their mor­ontial and spir­i­tual as well as in their mor­tal ca­reers. The dif­fer­ences in view­point be­tween male and fe­male per­sist even be­yond the first life and through­out the lo­cal and super­uni­verse as­cen­sions. And even in Ha­vona, the pil­grims who were once men and women will still be aid­ing each other in the Par­a­dise as­cent. Never, even in the Corps of the Fi­nal­ity, will the crea­ture meta­mor­phose so far as to oblit­er­ate the per­son­al­ity trends that hu­mans call male and fe­male; al­ways will these two ba­sic vari­a­tions of hu­mankind con­tinue to in­trigue, stim­u­late, en­cour­age, and as­sist each other; al­ways will they be mu­tu­ally de­pen­dent on co-op­er­a­tion in the so­lu­tion of per­plex­ing uni­verse prob­lems and in the over­com­ing of man­i­fold cos­mic dif­fi­cul­ties.

84:6.7While the sexes never can hope fully to un­der­stand each other, they are ef­fec­tively com­ple­men­tary, and though co-op­er­a­tion is of­ten more or less per­son­ally an­tag­o­nis­tic, it is ca­pa­ble of main­tain­ing and re­pro­duc­ing so­ci­ety. Mar­riage is an in­sti­tu­tion de­signed to com­pose sex dif­fer­ences, mean­while ef­fect­ing the con­tin­u­a­tion of civ­i­liza­tion and in­sur­ing the re­pro­duc­tion of the race.

84:6.8Mar­riage is the mother of all hu­man in­sti­tu­tions, for it leads di­rectly to home found­ing and home main­te­nance, which is the struc­tural ba­sis of so­ci­ety. The fam­ily is vi­tally linked to the mech­a­nism of self-main­te­nance; it is the sole hope of race per­pet­u­a­tion un­der the mores of civ­i­liza­tion, while at the same time it most ef­fec­tively pro­vides cer­tain highly sat­is­fac­tory forms of self-grat­i­fi­ca­tion. The fam­ily is man’s great­est purely hu­man achieve­ment, com­bin­ing as it does the evo­lu­tion of the bi­o­logic re­la­tions of male and fe­male with the so­cial re­la­tions of hus­band and wife.