Love, the Pillar of the Family Paradise

The pillar of the family paradise is love. And in love, man and woman differ. The man is the one who begins love; it is he who follows the woman to win her heart, while she expects the man to lead her to sip the last drop from the cup of pure love.

The girl surpasses the young man in the great importance she attaches to betrothal and marriage. She is more chaste than he, before marriage and after it. Before marriage she is distinguished from him also by her modesty, her calm, her silence, and her delicate sensibility, so quick to be wounded.

Love is a buried spring in need of a skilled and expert engineer to unearth it, that it may gush forth.

The mother who does not instruct her daughter in the secrets of marriage buries, without our knowing it, the spring of love in her heart, and causes the misery of the new family.

And woman is more generous than man, for she gives the most beautiful thing she possesses. She loves to have the way opened before her, that she may lead the man to happiness. And she worships the one who prefers her figurative gifts to his admiration of the reality.

Woman's heart hungers and thirsts for love, but she cannot carry her jar and draw except from the pure spring; and yet — alas — she drinks some of the drops that remain clinging to the man's skirts. For reaction has fettered woman's freedom, and fetters it still; she has not been able to shatter her chains and break free into wide nature as a rational human being.

Man's misery in the twentieth century has two sources: the first, his anxiety over obtaining the necessities of life — food, clothing, house, and furnishings; the second, and it is the more important, a mistaken family orientation, cups of love's wine standing empty, and a domestic atmosphere overlaid with the film of ignorance and misunderstanding and the fog of imagined doubt; confidence shaken, selfishness rampant, morals feeble, and a self-love that desires nothing but pleasure.

The husband, then, must fly on the wings of pure, enduring love over the green fields of desire, and return with love streaming from his heart and his tongue. He must create the atmosphere of happiness, that his reward may be abundant; for whoever is engulfed by the machinery of habit cuts the strings of the lyre of beauty and art, shatters the interpreter of his heart upon the rock of selfishness, and sinks into the abyss of wretchedness.

Woman hates to be a means; her wish is to be an end, and to remain a qibla toward which the man forever turns his face.

Love and respect are, in woman's existence, what time and space are.

And woman yearns to love, love for love and with her whole self; she loves him who loves; and she flies on the wings of the sensual to the heavens of spiritual bliss, where the feathers of the sensual fall away as the veil of doubt vanishes before the sun of certainty.

By this bliss woman lengthens the thread of her life, for she is longer-lived than man.

Let man understand, then, that woman's love for him does not entitle him to fetter her freedom or to hold absolute dominion over her body and her mind; and let her understand this truth as well; and let both of them know that love gives more than it takes, without hesitation or calculation, without pressure or restraint.

Springs possess the grandeur of giving, abundantly and freely. As the river sweeps away trifling things, so let the current of love sweep away the husks of discord in the family.

Man errs in his claim that he is stronger in feeling than woman. How many a man weakens feeling and strangles it in its cradle, whether out of ignorance or because he rushes forward more quickly than she; and though she is slower than he in the awakening of her emotions, she is also slower than he in quieting them, and stronger than he in curbing their unruliness. If she gave her emotions a little more rein, and if he curbed his emotions for a moment, the two spouses would never collide in a collision that may bring ill fortune and tear the union apart forever.

One of the writers of the fifteenth century said in La Tía Fingida: "A woman must be an angel in the street, a saint in church, beautiful at the window, faithful in the house, and a she-devil in her chamber."

And in my view, woman is like the hen: every time she drinks from the spring of happiness she lifts her head toward heaven, a token of the purity of her heart and the sincerity of her love — unlike man, who keeps his head bowed toward the ground of the sensual. Even should she rub her nose in the dust of the sensual, she remains more given than he to soaring in the higher world, more finely attuned to beauty; she swims in the air of beautiful art and the sky of the spirit; and words of admiration and praise and pleasant conversation delight her more than they delight him. And she surpasses him in valuing things at their true worth.

And it belongs to her nature that she resorts to enticement — by concealment, by the veil, or by seclusion.

Man's aim is that his emotions be refreshed with a selfishness and a recklessness of grievous consequence; her aim is to perfect the outpouring of her emotions, which are more precious than pearls — and she is most careful of all not to cast them before swine.

Woman's emotions are not perfected until thirty and beyond, and her womanhood and her vital organs do not complete their growth until after twenty. These are two objections leveled against early marriage, which so often fills the young wife's eyes with tears.

Peters believes that woman surpasses man in the emotional qualities, and that woman, after her experiences, possesses an overflowing sensibility, though she knows less than man of the structure of her body and of the treasuries of feeling within it.

She is more sensitive than a thermometer in telling sincerity from pretense, and more exact than a pressure gauge when she measures a kiss, for example — and woe to him who denies the blessing of love.

Her delicate sensibility rests upon the contentment and satisfaction of her heart, and these in their turn upon self-respect. Let man beware, then, of touching her with any harm, or of forgetting woman's soul and her spirituality; he must open her heart — without asking or pleading — with the key of patience, tact, and sincerity, if he would win happiness.

And of what use are gifts — diamonds and gold, fashions, the automobile, chocolate, the cinema, and the bank account — of what use are all these, if you leave the heart of your life's partner closed against you?

Let man set before his eyes that "art" is "to know how to make a woman happy."