Both are requisite to each other's completeness.

Plato entertained the idea that lovers each sought a likeness in the other, and that love was only the divorced half of the original human being entering into union with its counterpart.

But philosophy would here seem to be at fault, for affection quite as often springs from unlikeness as from likeness in its object.
The true union must needs be one of mind as well as of heart, and based on mutual esteem as well as mutual affection.

"No true and enduring love," says Fichte, "can exist without esteem; every other draws regret after it, and is unworthy of any noble human soul." One cannot really love the bad, but always something that we esteem and respect as well as admire.

In short, true union must rest on qualities of character, which rule in domestic as in public life.
But there is something far more than mere respect and esteem in the union between man and wife.