Author B writes in justification of the aesthetic significance of marriage. This presupposes an objection to or denial of the aesthetic significance of marriage.

Don Giovanni, Johannes the Seducer, and Author A himself all suppose a dichotomy between the erotic and marriage.

A. Immediacy, revealed by the dependency of romantic love on natural necessity, which is in turn grounded in beauty (sensual beauty and beauty depicted by the sensual).

"Natural necessity" here refers to the state of being affected or acted upon by outside forces. The immediacy generated by natural necessity locates this aspect of romantic love in time. It has a temporal aspect.

B. Consciousness of the eternal, revealed in the lovers' feelings that the relationship will last forever. Think of people in love. They are on cloud nine. This state of focusing on the relationship and its solid, unchanging character is all involve in the consciousness of the eternal.

A. The substantial element in marriage is being in love or romantic love. There are two reasons for this. First, being in love cannot be supposed to be something that comes along after marriage, for marriage presupposes that two are in love. Secondly, being in love cannot be supposed to be something to which marriage is but a sequel, for being in love is a present reality, a bond.

B. But Marriage is not identical with romantic love, for it is based on a resignation or resolution of the will. Hence it has an ethical element. It involves human choice. Romantic love does not.

Conclusion: It follows from (A) and (B) that marriage and romantic love are compatible.

Romantic love essentially lacks reflection. If it were reflective, then it would have a consciousness of time and change, and this kills the erotic, which is essentially immediate.

Falling in love involves both time and change (rooted in the natural necessity of the erotic) and also a consciousness of the eternal. Reflection creates an awareness of this opposition. The result is skepticism. "What if my love for her changes? What if her love for me changes?"

Two choices to resolve the problem, both of which try to relate the eternal in the erotic to time.

Seduction: Attempts to sustain the erotic through time by repetition of immediacy (Giovanni) or the continuing reflexive enjoyment of self through poetic reflection (Johannes the seducer). In doing so, seduction ends up negating the temporal and concrete and moves toward greater levels of abstraction, and thus break from reality. Don Giovanni and Johannes each break from actuality in the their effort to relate to immediacy. Since they cannot reckon with time (reality), they must reduce the immediate to a fictional relationship of some sort. They each embody a kind of poetic existence.

Seduction actually contradicts romantic love primarily because romantic love requires extension through time. Since the romantic is a relation to an eternal reality, if this reveals itself in time, it must exist through time. The temporal manifestation of the eternal is continuance and perseverance. Although seduction appears to give the erotic a history, it does not do so genuinely. Seduction allows the erotic to exist only at particular times or through time under the disguise of multiplicity. It loses itself in multiplicity, or - as in the case of Johannes - becomes a purely self-reflexive reality.

Marriage of Convenience: Attempts to unite the erotic with time by giving it a formal history. But this ends up neutralizing the sensual as a substantial reality. It is sensual only in appearance and lives only in the realm of time. Since there is no consciousness of eternity, the erotic does not actually exist at all.

But can marriage sustain the erotic through time?

According to Author B, the romantic can be sustained through a higher immediacy in marriage. The mode of sustaining the erotic cannot be reflective love, for that love creates doubt and skepticism. It must be a form of immediacy, but identical with the immediacy of romantic love.

In addition to the EROTIC, Marriage involves the ETHICAL and the RELIGIOUS:

The ETHICAL is the intention and will to sustain the romantic through time, which gives movement to love in time.

The RELIGIOUS is the realization that with God it is possible to sustain the romantic through time. The lover is a gift of God. Hence, in the ethical one wills what God has already willed.

Romantic love originates in time but involves eternity, but of its own nature it has no history. Marital love gives romantic love a history. It is thus that the aesthetic element in marriage is justified. Marriage creates a new kind of immediacy that contains and sustains the paradox of the eternal in time. It is not simply the consciousness of time and eternity (together), as that would mean despair and melancholy. It is a consciousness of time and eternity brought together by a resolution of the will, thereby introducing the category of the ethical to the human person.

What author A considers the monotony of marriage (which leads to boredom) is precisely the fact that it has a history. Author A wants romantic love without a history, but that's a contradiction. Romantic love must acquire a history, for the consciousness of the eternal (part of romantic love) is actualized only through time. In other words, the temporal manifestation of the eternal is movement through time. A love that begins and ends negates the eternal quality of love and thereby undermines even first love. For the aesthete, the romantic is in time only apparently, not really. Indeed his whole effort is to remove the erotic from time, to keep it an abstraction. The problem is that, though romantic love is in itself an abstraction, when the concrete, individual person enters into a relationship with it, that relation must find its expression or manifestation in temporal continuity.

"In itself romantic love always remains abstract, and if it is not able to acquire any external history, death already lies in wait for it because its eternity is illusory." - Judge Vilhelm