51. (7) Married couples enjoy the same intimate relations with each other as in the world, only more delightful and blessed, but without begetting children. Instead of or to take the place of begetting children, they experience a spiritual procreation, which is one of love and wisdom. Married couples enjoy the same intimate relations as in the world for the reason that after death a male is still a male and a female is still a female, and an inclination to conjunction has been implanted in each of the sexes from creation. In the human being, moreover, this inclination is an inclination of the person's spirit, and of the body as a result of his spirit. After death, therefore, when a person becomes a spirit, the same mutual inclination continues, and this would not be possible without a continuation of the same relations. For people are people as they were before, and nothing is missing from the male, and nothing from the female. They are the same as they were before in form, likewise in their affections and thoughts. What other conclusion follows from this, then, but that they have the same intimate relations? And because conjugial love is chaste, pure and sacred, that their intimate relations are also full and complete? (But for more on this subject, see the narrative account in no. 44.) The reason these relations are then more delightful and blessed is that when a person becomes a spirit, this love then becomes more interior and pure and so more capable of being perceived, and every delight increases with a person's perception of it, increasing even to the point that the blessedness of the love is noticed in its delight.