The woman is told (by the serpent) to consider the man as her rival, as the one who makes her a victim rather than as her companion. At the moment she listens, she starts her flight from love into an antagonistic and competitive understanding of human relations in which men and women are fundamentally rivals and enemies, and a gain for one must be a loss for the other. The moment she refuses to listen and insists that she is a creature of love because she is a creature of God, made to love and serve and to be loved and be served, she is safe, and her identity as a relational being, a person in a society of persons, is secure.
The result of considering one another as rivals and enemies rather than as companions and partners held together by love, is women have separated love from commitment. Love without commitment is mere sex, and the women who take the love without commitment have by their own will allowed themselves to become abased. They have prostituted themselves. As has any man who separates love from commitment. They have separated the act of love from the act of procreation, so that they refuse to acknowledge that love for this man may produce this child and turn into love for this child and so convert this woman into the happy servant of a new generation. By failing to commit themselves, and confine themselves, to one man, the specific man who is willing to stay with them and support them, they refuse to receive the children who would follow, so neither she nor he ever make the transition from uncommitted to committed and responsible. Neither of them ever has to grow up. They remain immature, unable to see beyond their own needs or see that there is a much greater world of love waiting for them, through service to their child, which is bigger and more rewarding than their own present immediate desires.
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