‘Adam knew his wife Eve’

I propose that our understanding of ancient biblical terminology defining marriage and the marital act, ‘one flesh,’ ‘to cling,’ and ‘to know,’ is brought to greater clarity when interpreted from the perspective of an insight shared by Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand and proposed in the DDF document, Uno caro, namely, that ‘the tenderness of affection between spouses plays a fundamental role, willed by the Creator’ (§ 47) In this paper, through an analysis of the spousal ‘we’ (the first person plural of the marital bond) from the perspective of the attentionality and intentionality of sexual knowing, I show 1) how such knowing is consummated (i.e., perfected) by spousal tenderness, 2) how the reciprocal clinging of spouses is secured by this same tender knowing, and 3) how the ‘one flesh’ union of marriage is then readied to attain its proper proportions as a singular kind of communio personarum.