§380 marriage 217
They added that people on earth have a hard time understanding this
because so few do experience true marriage love, and if people are not
intent on this, they have absolutely no knowledge of the inner delight
that dwells within that love. They are aware only of the delight of lust, a
delight that turns disagreeable after people have lived together for a little
while. The delight of real marriage love, though, not only lasts into old
age on earth but even becomes heavenly delight after death, when it is
fi lled with a deeper delight that becomes better and better to eternity.
The angels even said that the blessings of real marriage love could be
listed in the thousands, of which not a single one is known to people
here or comprehensible to the understanding of anyone who is not in a
marriage of the good and the true from the Lord.
Any love of control of one over the other utterly destroys marriage 380
love and its heavenly pleasure, for as already noted, marriage love and its
pleasure consist of the intent of one belonging to the other, and of this
being mutual and reciprocal. A love of being in control in a marriage
destroys this because the dominant partner simply wants his or her will to
be in the other, and does not want to accept any element of the will of the
other in return. So it is not mutual, which means that there is no sharing
of any love and its pleasure with the other, and no accepting in return.
Yet this sharing and the union that follows from it is the very inward plea-
sure that is called blessedness in marriage. Love of being in control stifl es
this blessedness, and with it absolutely everything heavenly and spiritual
about the love, to the point that even all knowledge of its existence is lost.
One could even say that it is held so cheaply that the mere mention of
[marriage] blessedness makes people laugh or fl are up in anger.
[ 2 ] When one partner wants or loves what the other does, then there
is a freedom for both, because all freedom stems from love. However,
there is freedom for neither one when there is control. One is the ser-
vant; and the one in control is also a servant, because he or she is being
driven like a servant by a need to be in control. However, people who do
not know what the freedom of a heavenly love is do not understand this
at all. They might fi nd out, from the things just said about the origin and
essence of marriage love, that as control comes in the door, minds are not
united but severed. Control subjugates, and a subjugated mind either has
no purpose or is of opposite purpose. If it has no purpose it has no love,
and if it is of opposite purpose there is hatred in the place of love.
[ 3 ] The deeper natures of people who live in this kind of marriage
clash and struggle with each other, as is normal for two things that are
opposed to each other, no matter how their outer natures are restrained