1. The first love - meaning the love before the wedding and just after the wedding - draws some of its character from a love for the opposite sex, thus from a heat belonging to the body not yet tempered by a love of the spirit. [2] 2. A person from being natural only gradually becomes spiritual. For a person becomes spiritual as his rationality - which stands in between heaven and the world - begins to draw its life or soul from what flows in from heaven. This occurs as he becomes affected by and is delighted with wisdom (the wisdom spoken of above in no. 130). To the degree that this happens, to the same degree his mind is raised into a higher atmosphere, which is the containing medium of heavenly light and heat, or, to say the same thing, of the wisdom and love which angels possess. For the light of heaven is united with wisdom, and the warmth of heaven with love. And as wisdom and its accompanying love increase in married partners, so conjugial love is purified in them. Because this occurs gradually, it follows that this love becomes more and more chaste. This spiritual purification can be likened to the purification of natural spirits which chemists perform, whose processes are called clarification, distillation, rectification, cohobation or redistillation, concentration, decantation, sublimation. And wisdom when purified may be likened to alcohol, which is a highly distilled spirit. [3] 3. Spiritual wisdom in itself is such that it grows warmer and warmer with the love of becoming wise, and because of this, it increases to eternity. This takes place as it is perfected as though by processes of clarification, distillation, rectification, concentration, decantation, and sublimation - processes which are accomplished by purifications and separations of the intellect from the misconceptions of the senses, and of the will from the temptations of the body. Now, because of this, it is apparent that conjugial love, being the offspring of wisdom, likewise becomes gradually more and more pure, thus more and more chaste. For testimony that the first state of love between married partners is a state of heat not yet tempered with light, but that it is gradually tempered as the husband is perfected in wisdom and as the wife grows to love that wisdom in her husband, see what was said in the narrative account in no. 137.