Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity transcending any two individuals. The very essence of such continuity is children- now fewer than before but retained far longer within the family bounds. Regardless of whether a particular couple is getting married for the companionship or psychoindustrial energy or sexual massage, one must separate the professed motives of the individuals from deeper sexual and evolutionary propensities. All sorts of superficial deviations and distortions- from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership- can be elaborated on the primal foundations of human life. But the foundations remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child, and the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children. The essential pattern is clear. Women manipulate male sexual desire in order to teach them the long-term cycles of female sexuality and biology on which civilization is based. When men learn, their view of the woman as an object of their own sexuality succumbs to an image of her as the bearer of a richer and more extended eroticism and as the keeper of the portals of social immorality. She becomes a way to lend elaborate continuity and meaning to the limited erotic compulsions of the male.