Never Too Late for Love
Regardless of age and past experience, it’s never too late for love. Love is the pivotal circumstance of everybody’s life, since it’s the inner impulse that never lets anyone rest for long. This is because woman is made for love and man is the great lover. As a universal state of supreme beauty, love is constant as the unifying principle in existence. But in a world where objects and people occupy a particular position in space and time, love is vulnerable to the forces of existence and must persevere in its task to restore the sense of separation to original unity.
Love has two aspects, both of which are extremely familiar to us all. There is the love of the indefinable, the inner source of radiance and joy. To love that which is unnameable, yet embraces everything that could possibly be imagined as a state of completion, is negation: the surrender of the person to the mystery behind the form. This inner devotion to the spirit out of existence has the effect of detaching from the world as a need for the repetition of experience. The second aspect is love in existence and this concerns everybody on earth. The attraction between man and woman is divine and never changes as an imperative for physical union between the opposite principles. What changes as people get older, or have experienced the often harsh lessons in their personal relationships, is the accumulation of emotion. Love is not an emotion but an original state of being. This timeless presence is the spiritual essence of the life, but is often imperceptible against the coarser vibrations of the emotional body.
People often become identified with their past hurts and disappointments of sex without love, and are adamant they will never again be subjected to such emotional pain. In my professional life I’ve encountered this on innumerable occasions, mostly with women. But when I’ve asked them if they still yearn for love, the answer is invariably ‘yes’ but with a reservation – they fear the sexual force of man and having to give in to his expectations and demands. Women who have experienced the disappointments, and sometimes degradation, of sex without love (and this is in most women’s experience), often cut off from man altogether. They are so appalled by his failure to love that they want no more to do with him at any personal level in their lives. Identified with their emotional suffering, they fail to perceive the protection that past experience has given them. This is for a woman to refuse to have sex with a man unless he’s able to demonstrate over time that he truly loves to be with her and is willing to take her on whatever the circumstances.
It’s quite common for older women to project their love exclusively onto grandchildren and live out their lives vicariously through them. This is disastrous for love because a woman can then become obsessively attached to them as a substitute for the love of man. Maturity in age brings a certain worldly wisdom but, sadly, not often in the areas of life so desperately needed. The wisdom of love is vitally important in this world, particularly for children today who are so often contaminated by exposure to pornography before they reach puberty. Anyone who has cut off from love as a conscious act of defiance or fear has forfeited the opportunity to give something back to life and love.
Many men and women become comfortable being on their own, and the prospect of a partner who could upset their daily routine is dismissed as completely unacceptable. It may be convenient living like that, but there will be a void in the life that is sometimes registered as feelings of loneliness and despair. When a woman is truly vulnerable to love so that her very existence becomes an impulse of devotion to a man who later leaves her or dies, the feeling is often that she’ll never be able to love another with the same intensity and passion again. This happens even in younger women, who often question whether they will find love again in their entire lives.
It’s a beautiful sensation to be held by another body and to feel the nourishment of masculine strength or feminine mystery. The touch of the hand communicates more than the physical feeling in someone sensitive to their own inner nature. Love is not just made in the sexual act, but in everyday life through being receptive and psychically open to the ever-changing moment. Attraction and enjoyment of another’s company is pleasant and lovely in its own right and needn’t go any further, unless it does. It’s the being which is resonant to love, and a man who can truly love the female principle is able to see her innate beauty, regardless of the ageing process of the body.
Everybody is waiting for love, even though an individual may declare with conviction that there’s no desire for romance. This was demonstrated to me by a widowed lady in her eighties who came for a consultation to hear what I could tell her about her life. Amongst other things, I told the lady that love was in the air and that she should be open for romance with a new man. On hearing this she said, ‘That’s all very well but what I really like is a good roast dinner’! Anyway she discovered to her amazement, when a man entered her life some months later, that it’s never too late for love.