In the beginning God created human beings, "male and female He created them" (Gen 1, 27). He created them in unity and in diversity: "This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Gen 2, 23), because women are different from men, created by God as suitable companions. This means that the primary unity includes within itself the diversity; since this diversity is irreducible and insurmountable, it exist as a principle of relation, allowing communion which is the result of free will: this is the reason for which man leaves his father and his mother, leaves his own home "and shall cleave to his wife and they shall be two in one flesh" (Gen 2, 24).

The Christian revelation therefore questions the concept (platonic) of a human nature that understands the diversity and the complementarity, as if they were destined to vanish in the unity of a love from which the complete human being is supposed to rise as if the result of the fusion of men and women. At the same time it also questions the contemporary attitude which attempts to abandon all real diversities, every interdependence between the two, attributing the principle of free and personal unity to the supreme will of each individual, reaching the point of denying the fundamental meaning of the male-female bond.

The reciprocity included in the creation by God Himself, thereby manifests from the very beginning human beings’ conjugal nature. Simultaneously it also expresses the inadequacy of the individual considered separately while on the other hand expressing the individual’s destination for perfecting the path of friendship and of love. It also allows one to observe the falseness of the very roots of a number of modern assertions concerning the individual’s self-sufficiency, described as sovereign and also free from all bonds.

Everything in the other person indicates the impossibility of being reduced to the will of one or the other, of losing oneself within a unity that in a certain sense overcomes individual diversities: the freedom of the spiritual being but also the individual’s physical reality. In fact, if freedom ineluctably speaks of the unfathomable profoundness of the other’s heart, the face and the body are also sacraments of each person - in their obvious otherness, fragility and beauty – and also always speak of something more, of a destination that questions the eyes of the other, asking and offering with modesty both respect and company.

The insurmountable diversity between men and women transforms them both, reciprocally, in the greater sign of the Other, not as a threat, but rather as a gift, a gratuitousness and a promise of life; it is also a sign of a unity that is free and founded on the love on which the perfection of human beings depends.

God in fact has inscribed within the nature of both men and women a call, a kind of vocation: at the origin of love there is always an asking of the other and not simply the expressing of the will to possess of one of the two. An asking that introduces a relationship expressed freely, that must always remain a being-asked, and therefore a desire for the good of the person loved, for the very reason that it concerns that person; not following one’s own wishes but according to their authentic destiny. In this way, each is transformed for the other, leading them to search for God’s will seen as the real horizon of love.

This reciprocity on the other hand invokes an incomparable relationship depending on the individual characteristics on men and women, thanks to which each receives from the other the realisation of fecundity otherwise impossible for each single individual. The giving up of oneself to the other in authentic love, made possible by this reciprocity, allows each individual a new and personal expression of themselves, a self-fulfilment in this love that ‘answers’ the real good of the other within the experience of communion. Furthermore there is also the fact that the fecundity which they both make reciprocally possible and the presence of children go well beyond the relationship achieved and the means used in this reciprocal love, converting itself once again in the clear mark of the Mystery, of the Father who is the origin and the friend of life.

One could therefore perhaps affirm that the experience of fatherhood and motherhood, which one makes possible for the other, holds in its fullness the mark of reciprocity that belongs to human nature, which, respected in its truthfulness, leads man to the Mystery of the Other, which is the Mystery of Love, of the Communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, historically revealed in the conjugal love of Jesus Christ and the Church (see Eph 5, 31-32).