But you did imply that you will experience a categorically distinct type of oneness with your wife, which you would not experience but for your eternal marriage. But if you love everyone else exactly as you love your wife (perfectly) and they love you the same way (perfectly), then all relationships will be perfect and experience the exact same degree of oneness. There will be nothing special about you and your wife’s relationship in those circumstances. Or to put it more precisely, all relationships will be equally special. None will be more special than others. Such is the nature of perfection. This is why marriage in the next world is irrelevant. But if your relationship with your wife will be more special than your other relationships, and your sense of oneness with your wife will be stronger, then your love for her will be stronger as the bond you share with her will be stronger. You will have a weaker bond with, and weaker love for, those you are not sealed to. This is not what relationships in heaven are supposed to be like, and in fact they won’t be that way. All relationships will be perfected. Marriage in that context is irrelevant, unless you plan to do things only married persons on earth are permitted to do. So it really does come down to the procreation issue for the Mormon point of view, doesn’t it?
NS
NS,
I simply disagree with your ideas about a “same degree of oneness”. People who are “one” because they are unified and have omniscience do not lose individuality. Nor do married people lose individuality, but they certainly experience the need for change and for seeking to understand other points of view and to forgive.
Perfection is sort of a meaningless word unless it is understood within the context of relationships and within the context of having arrived at that quality of life by progress and by Christ having suffered and paid the price for all the imperfections that one has experienced along the way toward that progressed condition of life.
Babies, for example, are innocent, but not perfect in the kind of sense of perfection of which we are speaking when we describe heaven and its relationships.
It doesn’t come down to the “procreation” point of view at all. Many wonderful marriages have no children born into the marriage, through no fault of the man and the woman–yet God sanctioned those marriages. Further, since intelligences have always existed, “procreation” is not a term that likely will be associated with bringing forth spirits from their condition as an intelligence.
The sense of oneness has to do with all the experiences of mortality and the spirit world that made that particular marriage unique, and guess who brought the uniqueness into a relationship when Christ is involved in the relationship?–Christ, Himself. He guides the progress of those who enter into covenant marriages, and it is very much through love, forgiveness, change, change, change, change, more change, more forgiveness, more love, more change. (You may get the idea.)
