First we must understand what love is. Once we understand the meaning of love, then we can practice it more perfectly. Love has been, perhaps,
the most widely used theme of our poets and they have defined love in many ways. Longfellow, it seems, came closest to the true definition of love when he said that "Love is the root of creation: God's essence." For love, if it is the true kind of love, should always be directed to eventual creation, that is to say, to the creation of children in the married state.
Marriage is the culmination of love. Two people should never fall in love with each other unless they understand thoroughly that their love for each other is to eventuate into a future marriage. Our civilization has lasted as long as it has because we have adhered strictly to this system of the relationship between man and woman. The birth of a child demands that man and woman participate in the creation. This is what marriage means: a coming together, a commingling, a fluxing, a joining, all for the purpose of perpetuating the race. This drive in the human being to perpetuate his race is blind. We do it only because something within us forces us to do it. And it is
that same blind something that brings two people together, neither knowing the why of their communion but each feeling that the marriage of their two selves was inevitable.
What we must remember, though, is that although it is nature that creates a mutual love in two people, it is the two people, themselves, who are responsible for the continuation of that love. Omar Khayyam said that only a hair divides the false and true. He could have said that even less than a hair divides love and hate. It takes very little for a great love to be changed into a great hate. Therefore, a working knowledge of the art of love is absolutely essential to the young couple who have ventured into love in order for that love to be perpetuated.
It is this knowledge of the art of love that this book intends to explain in the following pages.
