A Woman's Love

What happens when, in love, someone stops asking: What do I get from this person?

And asks something entirely different instead:

Am I capable of truly seeing and understanding this person? And what am I capable of giving him that will make his life more beautiful?

What follows may sound brutal to people today.

A 39-year-old woman once spoke about love. She said that what we experience as love today ultimately makes no sense. Couples go here and there, do things together, spend time together — but what is the point of it all?

„It's completely empty," she said.

But she didn't know how it could be different either.

Perhaps because by now we have almost completely forgotten what emotional and intellectual understanding are.

Yet if we stop looking at love as a physical relationship, as a way of filling a sense of emptiness, or as a series of things we do together, a very different process begins to emerge.

And this process has a profound purpose.

Imagine a middle-aged man with a great deal of life experience behind him.

If this man has spent his life practising understanding, he may eventually reach a point where he can barely carry on with his days. He has no partner, no home in the sense that there is no one who can calm him through her intellectual and emotional understanding — and through her body.

Then he asks a woman for help.

A woman who, because of her age, still has the opportunity to develop understanding so deeply that it becomes part of her very being.

And this is where the woman's choice begins.

Does her heart go out to this man?

Today's culture gives her plenty of reasons why it should not. The man is considerably older. Perhaps she no longer finds him attractive. Or perhaps she finds him very attractive indeed, but because of the age difference she nevertheless feels that she should not go down this path.

But this is where the woman's real challenge begins.

Does she turn away, or does she try to see what lies beyond the man's appearance?

If her heart goes out to him, she can begin to look beyond the surface.

And then something strange happens.

Instead of his appearance, the woman slowly begins to see what is inside him.

She discovers how this man thinks. What he has understood about life. What he can see that she cannot yet see. How he became the person he is. What he can pass on to her.

And if she experiences that his knowledge makes her own life more secure, better and easier, then at some point she begins to become emotionally attached to him as well.

She falls in love.

Not because she decided to fall in love.

But because the man's knowledge gives her a biological advantage.

As the woman absorbs this knowledge, her own life becomes more stable.

When you grow in this way beside another person, you can fall very deeply in love with them. And of course, you do not necessarily have to be a woman for this to happen.

Biology makes you fall in love when you unconsciously receive valuable knowledge from another person because life emotionally binds you to what strengthens your life.

But for the woman to be able to see what is inside the man in the first place, she must first learn to understand him.

Emotionally: What is he experiencing?

And intellectually: How did the person now standing before her become who he is?

And this is where love becomes more than the story of two people.

Because this is precisely the ability that her children will one day need from her.

When the woman becomes capable of understanding the man both emotionally and intellectually, the man slowly comes back to life. If she is unable to understand him, he does not come back to life, and no desire for the woman develops in him either.

So one of the woman's great challenges before she becomes a mother is:

Is she capable of giving life emotionally?

Can she bring a fallen person back to life?

In this sense, love is a rehearsal.

Because the child she may one day give birth to will enter the world helpless. That child, too, will need someone who does not merely look at them but also sees their emotional development. Someone who notices what is happening inside them and understands how she affects them.

And so love raises the question:

Does the woman feel compassion for the fallen man, or does she remain cold towards him?

A woman who is capable of emotionally saving a man through her understanding learns to see how she affects another person's inner world. In doing so, she practises precisely the ability she will also need as a mother: noticing what is happening inside another person and recognising how she affects them.

If she finds it difficult to learn how to help a man relax through emotional and intellectual understanding, she will also find it difficult to recognise how she affects the inner lives of her own children.

In today's world, we tend to put an equals sign between men and women even in the process of love.

As though they had to travel exactly the same path.

But look, for example, at mammals. Males generally do not fight the females. They fight one another.

The man who eventually asks a woman for help may already be exhausted.

He has fought his way through life.

He was not fighting the woman. Perhaps he was fighting society while trying to preserve who he was. He tried to understand how things are connected.

This was his life: the struggle and the cultivation of his understanding.

And of course, he still has a struggle in love.

Perhaps he is already close to collapsing when, as he approaches the woman, he encounters the tensions arising within her. Perhaps he must also face resistance from the people around her. He has almost no reserves left, yet he must mobilise them and try to reach the woman through his intellect and his emotions.

The woman's struggle is different.

In love, the woman primarily struggles with herself.

With whether she is capable of growing emotionally.

Can she learn to see the substance behind the appearance? This is the path of understanding.

Can she put aside what the world tells her when it conflicts with what her own good heart tells her?

The women I have known all turned away at this point when I asked them for help. Following society's ideas became more important to them than following what their good hearts were telling them.

But in doing so, they did not primarily hurt me.

They also hurt themselves.

Under today's ideas about relationships, many people never find this kind of deep understanding even when they otherwise experience their relationship as functioning well.

If women do not choose compassion and do not practise intellectual and emotional understanding, they will never experience the kind of love I am talking about here.

And if women have not learned understanding through the transformative process of love, it will become harder — perhaps even impossible — for them to understand their children as well. It will become harder for them to become the kind of support upon which their children can build their lives.

It is strange how this same story appears again and again in old fairy tales, even in cultures far removed from one another.

At the beginning, the woman often does not find herself standing before a young, handsome, desirable man.

A beast stands before her. A frog. A hedgehog-like man. A bear. In other stories, some other animal or enchanted creature.

At first sight, he seems to be the very opposite of someone a woman is „supposed to fall in love with."

And yet she enters into a relationship with him. She draws close to him. And over the course of the story, something changes.

The man emerges from behind the beast.

This story is so old and returns in so many different forms that it is worth asking:

What if these fairy tales preserve some very ancient human experience of love?

What if they are telling us that in love there comes a moment when the woman no longer sees only what her eyes showed her at first?

Instead, she sees the human being behind the appearance.

And when she sees the human being, his appearance changes for her as well.

Perhaps this is why the beast becomes a prince.

Not simply because the man has transformed.

But because the woman now sees something different in him.

This, to me, is the process of love.

Love is salvation.

The woman saves the man.

And the man saves the woman from later harming her own children without even realising it. And in the process, the man also breathes life into the woman — but I will tell that part another time.

The knowledge of love has been lost.

And perhaps it has been in front of us all along.

This is what the fairy tales were about.

Someone falls. Someone else sees in them what others can no longer see. They do not turn away. They draw close. They understand. And slowly, the other person returns to life.

But the one who saved them is transformed as well.

Love lifts a person back into life and gives them one of our most fundamental human capacities:

understanding.

And I still have not told you the final point of a woman's love.

Because at the end of this process, something else happens.

Something changes in the woman's brain.

The way she sees the man changes too.

The man who once perhaps seemed too old, whose appearance she once weighed and judged, whom she once saw through the eyes of the world, suddenly appears entirely different to her.

Because she no longer merely sees his face.

She sees the human being.