54. The following points need to be added to what has so far been reported about the state of married couples after death. (a) All married partners who are only natural are parted after death. This is because their love of marriage is cold, and their love of adultery is warm. Still after parting, they sometimes associate with other like couples, but after a short while they leave each other. This often happens repeatedly. At length a man is made subservient to some slut, and a woman to some adulterer; this happens in the prison of hell (described in APOCALYPSE REVEALED 153[.10]), where promiscuous fornication is forbidden on pain of punishment. (b) If one of a couple is spiritual and the other natural, they too are parted after death. The spiritual one is given a suitable partner, but the natural one is banished to join similar spirits in lewd surroundings. (c) Those, however, who lived unmarried in the world putting all idea of marrying far from their minds, remain unmarried, if they are spiritual. But if they are natural they become fornicators. It is different if unmarried people have longed to get married, and even more so if they have kept seeking to get married without success. If such people are spiritual, blessed marriages are found for them, but not until they reach heaven. (d) Those who were confined to monastic institutions in the world, young women as well as men, are after living the life of a monk, which continues for some time after death, freed from their vows and allowed out. They achieve the freedom to satisfy their longings, whether they want to live in a marriage or not. If they do, they can; if not, they are directed to the unmarried on the fringe of heaven. But those inflamed with impermissible lust are cast down. (e) The unmarried live on the fringe of heaven, because the sphere of perpetual celibacy is repulsive to the sphere of conjugial love, the sphere of heaven itself. This is because it comes down from the heavenly marriage of the Lord and the church.