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.
I thought my heart had been wounded with the claws of a lion.
Dear Valentine, I love you. Whoever you are.
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
I could never pretend something I didn't feel. I could never make love if I didn't love, and if I loved I could no more hide the fact than change the color of my eyes.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. _x000D_ Where there is hatred, let me sow love, _x000D_ Where there is injury, pardon; _x000D_ Where there is doubt, faith; _x000D_ Where there is despair, hope; _x000D_ Where there is darkness, light; _x000D_ And where there is sadness, joy. _x000D_ O Divine Master, _x000D_ Grant that I may not so much seek _x000D_ To be consoled as to console, _x000D_ To be understood as to understand, _x000D_ To be loved, as to love.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.