The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that true perfection in love lies within family bonds rather than romantic love, highlighting the importance of unconditional maternal love.
Germaine Greer's quote draws a distinction between different types of love, asserting that the most perfect form of love is found within familial relationships, particularly through the unconditional love of a mother. While acknowledging the significance of fatherly love, she warns that unbalanced or uncorrected fatherly love can lead to negative consequences. This suggests that love in its ideal form is characterized by commitment and nurturance, rather than conflict and insecurity often found in romantic relationships.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might reflect on the unconditional love of family as foundational to a successful marriage.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Man is in love and loves_x000D_ what vanishes,_x000D_ What more is there to say?
Ah! when will this long weary day have end, And lende me leave to come unto my love? - Epithalamion
I think, a lot of times, people just want to be cool, and to be in love is not cool. But I think it's the coolest. I think love is the coolest thing that there is.
If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt.
To be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear.
If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.
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