Lohengrin and Elsa are meant for each other. Their first meeting is bathed in a mystical glow induced by the same device Wagner employed in Der Fliegende Holländer, to wit: a man of demigodly stature—that is, immortal pending developments, one of the men cursed, the other blessed, but in terms of mortality in the same boat, as it were—is summoned by a woman via dream or trance to save her from a crucial predicament. He will be her salvation. In exchange, she will take him into the quotidian human world and promise him unquestioning loyalty. By so doing, she will be his salvation, for what he seeks is to shed his demigodly stature and become fully human. We understand that behind this mutual yearning lie many centuries of mythological metaphor—of monsters fatefully admitted into households, or of GrecoRoman gods seeking to mate with mortal women, for instance. But, mystical glow and mythical metaphor notwithstanding, in the Bridal Chamber this yearning is presented in strictly human terms, albeit romantic ones both with and without the initial upper-case “R.” In truth, the first meeting of Lohengrin and Elsa is simply a pre-sanctified version of the love-at-first-sight encounters common to nearly all E-19 protagonist couples, wherein an instant, intuitive, and irresistible attraction leads to a life commitment with no basis in experience save the initial emotional event itself. Now, they have just come from the high wedding ceremony, so both have doubled down on their earlier pledges, till death do them part. Elsa, we have seen, has been troubled by having been presented with all the questions anyone would want to ask of anyone else before making such a pledge, and then finding her innocent trust publicly betrayed by the hardly-disinterested person who raised the questions. Having invited the monster across her threshold, she is now doing her best to set her doubts aside. But the whole situation is quite unnatural, even fantastical. As the happy couple face the task of bringing it down to earth, they are at a disadvantage: Lohengrin doesn’t know a blessed thing about women beyond his chivalric instructions on how to treat them, and the orphaned Duchess of Brabant cannot be far ahead of him when it comes to the opposite sex. Wagner, by the way, knew a bit about women, love, and sex in his Lohengrin years, though he was to find out more later. So he understood the fearful pangs of initiation.^(I)