Because of their problems in loving, many people arrive at a point where they turn against love itself. Having lost their hope of achieving love, they quite humanly tend to depreciate it, try to minimize its importance. One of the commonest statements I hear from frigid patients in the first interview goes something like this: “Well, it really doesn’t matter, I suppose; there aren’t very many happy marriages anyway. And I suppose there are more important things than love.” Let us correct any tendency of this kind right here and now. Using the word in its widest sense, I would say that the ability to love is the single most important characteristic that man has. It is the faculty upon which all the great actions, hopes, and aspirations of the world are founded. Without it there could be no brotherhood among men, and therefore the very concept of civilization as we understand it would be unknown, even unthinkable. Men would be essentially isolated individuals whose personal drives, needs, and appetites would be the only realities to them. Aloneness, a terrible loneliness (those who cannot love will know what I mean), would be mankind’s lot. Love means, in its very deepest sense, union; union between individuals, between women and women, men and men, men and women. It is the most basic and profound urge we have, and its power for good is illimitable. In love we make the good of our partner (whether he is our child, our neighbor, or our sweetheart) as important to us as our own good. In the union of love we are able to experience the essential oneness of man and nature, to know that the universe is indeed our home and all men within it members of our family. In this way man learns through love that he is not alone, not condemned to the pain and anxiety he experiences when he has nobody with whom he can share his mind, his heart, his body. The concept of this happy unity is most clearly seen in the love between men and women. The act of sexual love is a direct expression of it. Two individuals once unknown to each other, until recently total strangers, now nevertheless literally merge together physically, know each other in the closest of physical embraces. They were miraculously made for this purpose, constructed for this union. The man leaves something of himself within the woman, his sperm. And a part of the woman joins this, merges with it. They have indeed become one flesh. And this merging, in addition to the joy and comfort it brings to each to join with the other as one, can become a creative act. From the union a child may be created. Thus we see that the profound result of the union which always characterizes love is productivity, creation.