59. The reason why love truly conjugial is so rare that it is not known what it is and scarcely that it is, is because the state of pleasure before the nuptials is afterwards changed into a state of indifference arising from insensibility to that pleasure. The causes of this change of state are more than can here be adduced, but they will be adduced in the following pages when the causes of colds, separations, and divorces are disclosed in their order. There it will be seen that with most men at this day, the image and with it the knowledge of conjugial love is so far effaced that it is not known what it is and scarcely that it is.
It is known that every man when born is merely corporeal, and that from being corporeal he becomes natural, more and more interior, and then rational, and finally spiritual. The reason why this takes place progressively, is because the corporeal is as the ground wherein, in their due order, are implanted things natural, rational, and spiritual; thus the man becomes more and more a man. [2] It is almost the same when he enters into marriage; the man then becomes a fuller man because conjoined with a consort with whom he acts as one man. In the first state, spoken of above, this is effected in an image; then in like manner he commences from the corporeal and advances into the natural, but now as to the conjugial life and hence as to conjunction into a one. They who then love corporeal natural things, and only from them love things rational, cannot be conjoined with a consort as into a one except as to those externals. And when the externals fail, cold invades the internals and dispels the delights of that love, first expelling them from the mind and so from the body, and then from the body and so from the mind, and this until nothing is left of the remembrance of the early state of their marriage, and consequently no knowledge concerning it. Now since this is the case with most men at the present day, it is clear that it is not known what love truly conjugial is and scarcely that it is. Not so with those who are spiritual. With them, the first state is an initiation into perpetual states of happiness; and these states are promoted in the degree that the spiritual rational of the mind of the one, and from this the sensual natural of the body, conjoins and unites itself with that of the other. But such men are rare.