Jealousy In Women

It was discovered earlier that:

when a love is attacked, it defends itself through its intellect, and the intellect through rational and conjectural appraisals, by which it pictures to itself the outcome.  Especially does it do so by such contemplations as are bound together with the love that is being attacked.  If it did not do this, by the loss of that love the whole form would be upset. (CL 361; see also CL 360)

The essential facts to understand about jealousness between the genders are:

Jealousness in men and jealousness in women are different, being from a different origin.  The origin of jealousness in men is in the intellect, whereas in women it is in the will adjoined to the intellect of her man.  Jealousness in men is therefore like a blaze of fury and anger, while in women it is like a fire contained by various fears, by the varying ways in which they regard their husbands, by the varying ways in which they view their own love, and by their varying degrees of prudence in not revealing their love to their husbands by a display of jealousness.  These differences exist, because wives are forms of love, and men recipients; and wives have to be careful not to destroy their love in men, whereas its recipients do not have to exercise the same care with their wives … The situation is different in the case of spiritual people.  In their case the man’s jealousness is transmitted to the wife, as the wife’s love is transmitted to the husband; and therefore the jealousness in one and the other against the attempts of a transgressor appear alike.  However, against the attempts of a transgressing trollop the wife’s jealousness is infused into the husband, which is felt as grief weeping and moving the conscience. (CL 379)

Therefore it is clear that for women, jealousness requires prudence in the case of natural people that is not the case with men.  However, in a spiritual marriage, when a couple is working toward actual conjunction, partner’s can rely on each other to tip them off to possible threats to their relationship.  Women from their perception of their husband’s attraction to them can warn him when he is sensing an attraction from another source.  And men, for their part, can warn their wives when they judge that a particular man is in pursuit of her.

Conjugial Love And The Love Of Children

The atmosphere of the love of little children:

affects the feminine sex primarily, thus mothers, and the masculine sex or fathers from them.  This stems from the [fact] that the atmosphere of conjugial love is received by women and communicated through women to men, for the reason that women are born forms of love for the understanding of men, and the understanding is its recipient.  It is the same with a love of little children, because this originates from conjugial love. (CL 393)

The fact that the love of little children is an offshoot of conjugial love explains why it is that:

the state of love that wives have before conception is of one character, and of another character after conception to the time of birth.  [For] a love of procreating and the subsequent love of the child procreated are implanted in women in their conjugial love, but … these two loves are separated in her when the end, which is the love of procreating, commences its progress.  It is apparent from a number of indications that love for the child or storgé is then transmitted from the wife to the husband, and also that the love of procreating, which in a woman is united, as said, with her conjugial love, is then not the same. (CL 403)

Many have thought that:

mothers acquire a love of little children from their having nourished them in the womb with their own blood, and from the children’s consequent assimilation of their life, and so from a sympathetic union between them.  But this is nevertheless not the origin of that love, since, if, without the mother’s knowing, another child were substituted after the birth in place of the true one, she would love it with equal tenderness as if it were her own.  Moreover, little children are sometimes loved more by their nurses than by their mothers. (CL 393)

The origin of the love of little children is “from no other source than the conjugial love implanted in every woman, to which has been adjoined a love of conceiving, the delight of which causes a wife to be prepared for reception.  This is the first beginning of that love, which after the birth passes with its delight in fullness to the child” (CL 393, see also CL 409).

One question that may arise is, how then can parents who are not in conjugial love, love their children?  The answer is that:

In homes in which there is no conjugial love between husband and wife, it nevertheless still exists in the wife, through which she has some external conjunction with her husband.  It is for this same reason that even licentious women love their offspring.  For anything that has been implanted in souls from creation and looks to procreation, is indelible and cannot be eradicated.        CL 409

This teaching uncovers the fact that conjugial love is irremovably in women.  The reason that all women love little children is that this is an outlet for their conjugial love – even if their decisions or circumstances have occluded the more direct outlet which is marriage.

Men Can’t See Love

Having established previously that men only see truth and women only see love, when a statement is made that “people know that love exists, but they do not know what love is” (CL 34, see also DLW 1) it opens the mind to wonder if perhaps this is only referring to men.  This questioning is further supported when it is seen that “whenever someone meditates on it, he cannot then form for himself any idea in his thought about it, thus he cannot bring it into the light of his understanding, because it is not a matter of light but of warmth” (CL 34) or that “he does not know that love is his very life, not only the general life in his whole body and the general life in all his thoughts, but also the life in every single particle of them” (CL 34).

It was shown above that “women have an interior perception of love, while men have only a more superficial perception” (CL 47r) and that angel wives “can see keenly what attraction you feel and therefore what affection you have, which is where your thought concerning love for the opposite sex comes from” (CL 155r.2).  It is plain in many places that men see truth and women see love.  An example of this is:

The Lord attaches and joins good to the truths a person acquires, because a person cannot take goodness as originating with him, since it is invisible to his sight.  The reason is that goodness is a matter of warmth rather than light, and warmth is not seen but felt.  Consequently, when a person sees truth in his thinking, he rarely reflects on the good that flows into it from the love in his will and gives it life.  A wife also does not reflect on the goodness in herself, but on her husband’s inclination toward her, which depends on the ascent of his understanding to wisdom.  She influences him with the goodness that is in her from the Lord without the husband’s having any awareness of that influence.  From this the truth now appears, that a person acquires truth from the Lord, and that the Lord joins good to the truth according as the truth is put to use, thus as a person tries to think wisely and so live wisely. (CL 123)

In this passage, therefore, “a person” must mean either a married pair or the husband.  This hypothesis is furthered by the reflections of some angel wives who explain how it is that women see love:

Every man has five senses … but we have also a sixth sense, which is a sense of all the delights of conjugial love in our husbands. … All the happy and pleasant states of the thoughts of their mind, and all the joys and delights of their heart, and the merry and cheerful feelings in their breast – these are transmitted from them to us, taking form in us and becoming perceptible, discernible, and tangible…In a word, the spiritual delights of our husbands take on a kind of natural embodiment in us.  And for that reason, our husbands call us the sensory organs of chaste conjugial love and therefore of its delights.  But this sense in our sex appears, continues, remains, and rises in the measure that our husbands love us for our wisdom and judgment, and in the measure that we love them in return for the same qualities in them. (CL 155r.4)

Their husbands add, “We have [a sense of conjugial love] in general, but not in particular.  We have a general sense of bliss, of delight, and of pleasant contentment, owing to the particular sensations of these in our wives.  And this general sense, which we have from them, is like a peaceful serenity” (CL 155r.4).  These are striking at the core of the issue, which is that men are the intellect and women the will of the human race.  Although both have a will and understanding, in a man these are both faculties of the intellect, in a woman they are both faculties of the will.  Therefore man can only see love by means of truth and “no one can see the endless varieties of this love in any light of the understanding, even if elevated, unless he first knows what that love is like in its true essence and perfect state, thus what it was like when, together with life, it was bestowed on mankind by God” (CL 57).  The reason that “no one has traced the origin of this love from this source before [is] because no one has seen that there is any union between good and truth.  No one has seen it, moreover, because goodness is not visible to the sight of the understanding as truth is, and therefore knowledge of it has remained hidden and eluded investigation” (CL 83).  Through the decline of wisdom in the human race, people came to believe “that a person is intelligent and wise and thus truly human according to the truths that he thinks, speaks, writes, and believes, and not at the same time according to his goodness” (CL 83).  This is simply not the case, for “speech and action that spring from thought … do not spring from thought, but from love acting through thought” (CL 36).  The fact is everything that men see is in the light of the understanding, and everything that women see is in the light of the will.  Therefore, although men, from the light of the understanding, cannot see love except as it evidences itself in wisdom; women can see love, and in fact only see love from the heat of the will.  Therefore, when a man says he sees and a woman says she sees, although they may be regarding the same phenomenon, they are not witnessing it in the same fashion.  However, more will be said on this topic in Chapter 2, in the section titled “Recognition.”