“Encamp outside the camp seven days. Whoever of you has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment…. Then Eleazar the priest said to the men in the army who had gone to battle: “This is the statute of the law that the LORD has commanded Moses… You must wash your clothes on the seventh day, and you shall be clean. And afterward you may come into the camp.”
Numbers 31:20-24
Woman is the glory of man, because in her softness she receives, enhances, celebrates, and embodies what a man’s hardness provided. Hardness, however, is not comforting nor sustainable, and man therefore longs to see, to touch, to connect with, and to reside within the softness his flinty determination has provided for and enabled.
Hardness takes out of the world, carves, separates, tames, defines, borders, excavates, sculps, and protects: a man wrests the opportunity for peace from chaos. Softness receives, shapes, rearranges, bears fruit: women fill the now boundaried void with peacefulness.
Men are designed to more easily compartmentalize the hardness required in a sin-broken world from the environment of home, while women are more interconnected and struggle to separate what may be required from where they find rest.
Men learn from a woman’s softness that pleasure is obtained not through hardness but through gentleness. (Gentleness is strength under restraint.)
A man cannot sustain a constant state of hardness but prepares ahead of time to be ready when called upon. Softness, on the other hand, is a state conducive to dwelling.
A man must learn the necessity of preparatory denial. A woman learns that persistent joy is experienced by providing comfort.
A goal or purpose is obtained via hardness but enjoyed via sharing and reception.
Hardness exhausts; softness comforts and restores. Provision exhausts; reception inspires and renews.
Mutual satisfaction and ultimate personal expression is conditionally experienced within the confines of and after the provision of shelter and sustenance. This is seen in relational dynamics and in physical environment. The raw opportunity provided by a man is received by the woman and filled by her soft skills with comfort and peace.
As a hardened one, a man’s greatest longing is fulfilled and pinnacle experience is realized through the reception by and intermingling with a woman’s softness. He sees, feels, and otherwise experiences the glorification of what his hard sacrifice has won, and what he has provided becomes what it otherwise could not have been. In perceiving this transformation of what has been received, gratitude is experienced, wonder is evoked, appreciation whelms, loyalty is reinforced, and weariness assuaged.
Because each man and each woman is unique, the specifics of how this presents in any given marriage is widely varied.