Love

I am talking with a female colleague. We do not particularly like each other. She tells me various things about her life. She also says that her grandfather died when she was fourteen.

She says it just as neutrally as everything else — simply another event in her life.

I listen to what I hear and try to sense which detail might carry significance and lead deeper.

Here I stop and ask her, perhaps something like: “What was your relationship with your grandfather like?”

The woman pauses for a moment.

If I remember correctly, I ask what his death meant to her.

She then tells me that her grandfather had raised her and that, to this day, she cannot forgive herself for what she did because she feels that she deceived him before he died.

And then she starts crying.

I have seen this many times.

Someone understands a person. You help create a situation in which they can say what is hurting them, and they calm down.

Another woman became unwell while cycling. Her heart was beating rapidly, but there was no organic abnormality.

The heart is sensitive to our emotions.

I began to suspect that the woman was suffering from an emotional problem. After examining her, I told her that it had occurred to me that something might be weighing very heavily on her and that this might have caused her rapid heartbeat.

She began telling me that everything was just pressure: she still had to do this and that, she had to keep going because she had to care for relatives — her son was ill, her husband was ill, and so on.

Fluid gathered in the corner of her eye, and she stopped.

I told her there was time to cry.

Then the dam broke, and she continued talking.

At the end of a conversation like this, you may find yourself sitting opposite a pair of huge, friendly eyes looking at you in complete relaxation because, perhaps for the first time in their life, someone has understood them.

She was not my patient, and I was not even supposed to be listening to her.

Two weeks later, someone knocked on my door.

I had no idea who it was.

I said, “Come in.”

It was her.

In her hand was a little teddy bear. In the teddy bear's hands were a tiny chocolate and a sign saying “Thank you.”

I have experienced this many times.

The journey through which I learned this method was not easy, but it was wonderful.

I had to learn to tune in to people's feelings, to show empathy and to help them express what they were feeling.

At the same time, I had to analyse their words while leaving my own feelings alone, and help them put into words what was inside them.

Have you ever felt the elemental force that comes from being understood?

You relax completely.

At first it may feel almost as though someone has hit you over the head. You might even fall asleep. Then you become full of energy, and often you begin to see the key to your own problems.

Even many psychologists do not know this method.

I once spoke with a sixty-year-old man.

He asked whether I was in a relationship, and then proudly told me that he had been in a marriage based on love for thirty years.

The conversation turned to my view that understanding is the foundation of love.

He said that being understood is something you long for your entire life, but your partner does not understand you. So you hug and kiss them, because that they understand.

He said that having another person truly understand you is impossible.

People spend their entire lives longing to be understood, but never receive it.

All of my experiences of love are connected with understanding.

And today this is almost completely unknown.

Not entirely. There are one or two people who have experienced it.

There was once a woman to whom I was not attracted, but I regularly visited her to talk.

I felt good with her. I could be who I was.

One day, after leaving her, I was walking down the street when I felt warmth behind my sternum, around my heart.

An infinite calm came over me, an immense, warm love that seemed to embrace the entire world.

It was as though an enormous warm red blanket lovingly embraced even those who hated one another.

At the same time, completely spontaneously, I felt that I would give my life for this woman. Her life and happiness became more important to me than my own life.

I was eighteen.

That was the moment when I began to suspect that “love at first sight” was nonsense.

It had nothing to do with love. It was desire and hormones.

By contrast, I found the development of this other kind of love very rational from the perspective of life, even though the feeling itself had arisen completely spontaneously.

Because if this woman were the mother of my children, I could be confident that my children would also be allowed to be themselves beside her and would have the possibility of discovering who they were.

This love required time.

It required the safety of feeling that beside another person I could be who I was.

If I compare this with desire, which today is often called love, then in a desire-based relationship you meet someone, fall head over heels, feel butterflies in your stomach, become enveloped in a pink haze, and only one or two years later discover who the other person actually is and whether you are compatible.

By then, there may already be a child.

A relationship built on desire is built on complete uncertainty.

A relationship built on understanding is built on safety.

My concept of safety is probably quite different in many respects from that of people today.

Money can improve your life up to a certain point. Beyond a certain amount, more money no longer makes your life more beautiful.

But there is something else: relationships.

Someone understanding your emotions.

Someone responding appropriately to your emotions: when you complain, for example, they do not immediately give you advice but listen to you; when you are sad, they do not make a joke but empathise with you.

And they understand where you came from, what your earlier life was like and how your inner world developed.

Perhaps you once could not set boundaries, and later you learned to.

So someone understands me emotionally and intellectually — they see me — and they do not misuse what they see, but use their understanding to help me.

That, for me, is safety.

And you can fall in love with that safety.

Very much so. Very deeply.

For me, it is much stronger than anything desire alone can lift you into.

I suspect that modern people hardly know this kind of love anymore because they hardly know understanding either.

And when understanding is missing, we lose safety and try to replace it through the misuse of power.

I believe many of our relationships today are also built on this power.

Desire is simple; it is appearance. You do not see the other person. Something happens, but you do not see the content beneath it.

To make what I mean by love even clearer, I would like to talk for a moment about a child.

I was helping out in a kindergarten.

One child fell on her finger, cried and ran to me. I comforted her.

Another little girl was standing behind her. She ran over to me as well and said that she too had fallen on her finger.

I grinned at how clever she was to invent an excuse to get my attention.

That evening, I was no longer grinning.

When I reviewed my day, I realised that other children had been direct: they simply said what they wanted.

But this little girl had behaved in a similar way several times.

I thought about it further.

She was three years old, and at that age a child behaves according to the role they are given at home.

So I began to suspect that at home she received parental attention only when she performed in some way.

Then something clicked for me:

If a parent can see how they are shaping their child's unconscious behavioural patterns, they can give that child a good life, because these unconscious behavioural patterns can determine the course of a life.

For example, whether you become aggressive when you do not get something you want, and are later excluded because of that, and so on.

Today I hardly know anyone who truly sees either themselves or another person.

When something was difficult for me, mothers whose children were already adults often simply did not respond to my pain at all.

Not because they did not care about me — many of them liked me very much — but because they did not know how to respond well or how to understand.

Today's culture largely prepares a woman for what kind of appearance she should create, but barely, if at all, for how to understand another human being.

When you look at a couple, you can see their ages.

Perhaps you think that if they are roughly the same age, then everything is fine.

And if you see a couple with a large age difference, perhaps you even feel disgust, because today people are taught to hate this. The internet is full of hostility toward relationships with large age gaps.

Not long ago there was a woman who liked me, but she was approximately thirty years younger.

Her female friends appeared and were bothered by my being there because I am a middle-aged man.

The woman who liked me suggested that I go inside because there were surely plenty of people there too.

I could not find anyone inside to talk to, so I went back outside.

Then a gallant knight appeared to “protect” the women, pushed me aside and said that I was harassing the girls.

Of course, I had done nothing.

The hatred is already inside people.

The belief that partners should be the same age is extremely strong.

But is it justified?

It took me twenty years after the end of my teenage years to learn how to recognise and change my own unconscious behavioural patterns.

Twenty years later, I would have been capable of giving a child something I could not have given before: recognising my child's unconscious behavioural patterns and consciously helping shape them in a way that would give the child the best possible life.

Those twenty years were an enormous amount of work.

After a devastating experience of loss that I never wanted to experience again, I had the idea that I would try to understand myself so that I would never again have to experience a similar loss and could eliminate my own contribution to such a situation.

So I decided that I wanted to understand myself and how I think.

At the same time, I wanted to understand what love is.

The journey began with one realisation in a grocery store.

I asked the shop assistant for some cheese. She misread where I was pointing and gave me not the cheese I had indicated but the cheese next to it.

I did not want that cheese, but I accepted it.

A month later, I was in a flower shop. I pointed to a carnation standing in a bucket packed with flowers.

The florist misread where I was pointing and gave me the carnation next to it.

At that moment, a month later, I suddenly thought: “Oh.”

Everything was different. It was a different shop. I was buying something completely different.

But fundamentally the same thing was happening:

I wanted something. I did not receive what I wanted. I did not like what I received.

And I accepted it.

That was the first moment when I stepped out of my unconscious childhood world and crossed into the world of awareness.

For the first time, I saw something I had previously been doing unconsciously.

Then it took me approximately five or six years to learn to see myself from the outside almost as though I were an object, and simply describe what I saw: which direction my feet were pointing, how tense my abdominal muscles were, how I held my hands and fingers.

I learned when I could legitimately say that two things were connected and when I had to reject the supposed connection.

During this period, every human brain is still maturing, and by the time my brain had completed its maturation, seeing connections had become second nature to me.

After that, I spent years trying to understand love and identify recurring patterns within it.

I believe I succeeded in understanding the male side of falling in love.

A recurring pattern was that when I could be myself in the company of a woman, I fell in love. When understanding was also present on the woman's side, the feeling became stronger and developed more quickly.

But I saw a disturbance in the development of love on the female side.

I felt that the world places women under pressure and suppresses the natural way in which love develops in them.

It is suppressed so strongly that I could not even study it directly. I was forced to construct a theory.

Over the years, I began to see reflections of that theory. I saw that genuine female love exists, although today only in fragments.

And I noticed that fairy tales preserve the full path through which female love develops.

I understood a great many things during those years, and my attention partly turned away from myself.

But at some point I returned to the cheese story, and by then I began to see it differently.

I asked myself why I had accepted the cheese.

Then I realised:

Because I was afraid.

Fear was maintaining several unconscious behaviours within me.

So I began examining the relationship between emotions and our unconscious behaviours.

I came to believe that our emotions can hold our unconscious behaviours in chains.

That was another approximately five years of my life.

Perhaps it was a side road — although only partly — when I realised that the depths of the unconscious lead into the spiritual world described by Carl Gustav Jung and by fairy tales and legends.

But let me return from that side road to the question of how a man matures and what the natural path of love might be for a woman.

By then I could see how emotions maintain unconscious behaviours.

And then came the breakthrough.

I asked:

Why was I afraid?

And I realised that my parents had such a strong drive for power that they suppressed my defensive behaviours.

Those behaviours were not merely prevented from developing. I was actually punished as a child when I tried to defend myself.

I had no communication tools with which to protect myself.

From that point, it took me approximately another five years to consciously rewrite my behaviours.

And this brought many changes to my life.

For example, before this I was regularly fired. Afterwards, I earned more than my colleagues.

I stood up for myself.

I lived for who I was.

When someone attacked me verbally, I learned to deal with it without usually attacking them back with insults.

I often set boundaries in such a way that some of the people involved later even became my friends.

There is, however, something that cannot come into existence: love — the real kind, in which a woman understands you.

It cannot come into existence because the world does not allow it.

Because for a woman to understand in this way, a man must introduce her to this process — a man who has already learned how understanding works.

A man who longs for this falls in love with a woman when she understands him.

When a man is younger, he may desire a woman's body more strongly.

As he reaches middle age, if he has followed the path of understanding, a woman becomes physically attractive to him through her understanding, because that understanding creates intimacy within him.

Man and woman are complementary.

In a world where relationships are based on a man's desire for a woman's body, a woman learns to influence through her body.

In a world dominated by understanding, a woman learns to look beyond appearance and see the content underneath.

If the content is that the man understands her and also provides material security, then, in my view, the biological benefit is so great that the woman can fall in love with him.

Today this is forbidden in practice because society agitates against relationships with large age differences, even though an older man may, through experience, have developed the knowledge required to introduce a woman to the practice of understanding.

The man returns home after his journey, while the woman receives safety and begins her own journey of understanding.

The man gives direction; the woman gives warmth — the warmth of curiosity and wonder.

And this is precisely what their child will later need:

“Little one, what amazing things you are doing!”

“Right, Mommy? Look what an amazing thing I can do!”

And the child lays their head down to sleep feeling:

Mom sees me.

My hypothesis is that perhaps today we are all psychologically wounded.

Because Mom does not see.

Because Mom herself was not seen.

Because before she became a mother, society prevented her from experiencing love.

Now comes what I think about age.

In order to recognise patterns, you often have to place yourself in opposition to the ideas of society and your environment.

Among the women I have met, what other people thought of them had an enormous influence on their lives.

That way of thinking and the way of thinking in which you genuinely do not care what others think of you are complete opposites.

It is one or the other. The two do not easily coexist.

For this reason, I think men may have more opportunity to undertake independently the journey down into their own unconscious and into the deeper forces shaping society and life.

But even this does not necessarily mean that it makes sense for a woman to form a relationship with a man merely because he understands how a child's unconscious behavioural patterns develop.

In principle, a forty-year-old man who is only then beginning to master this capacity could also introduce a woman to this world, although by then the woman has already lived her entire previous life differently.

It is therefore difficult to imagine simply stopping all the thought patterns that constitute one's daily routine.

But let us assume that it is possible.

There is another argument as well.

The period in which recognising connections can become almost instinctive coincides roughly with the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which is largely completed around the age of twenty-three to twenty-six.

A woman can be inspired at any age, but my hypothesis is that after roughly twenty-three to twenty-six, this form of understanding will be less likely to become completely second nature, and with increasing age it may become progressively harder to acquire.

In my view, the natural model of the relationship between woman and man is complementary rather than based on sameness.

Modern people seek sameness, but complementarity, as I understand it, means that a man who has matured along the path of understanding inspires a woman, and through his influence she transforms.

By the time a man could, at the earliest, become highly skilled in recognising and consciously reshaping unconscious patterns, he might already be at least around thirty-nine.

At that point, he can lead a woman toward love if she allows it.

Today's ideas about relationships between people of the same age may appear very beautiful, but I believe they can conflict with what is genuinely beneficial for the next generation and for the members of the relationship.

Such a model can thrive in a world like ours, a world immersed in appearances.

I do not know whether my voice will be loud enough for people to hear me — whether perhaps among them there will also be a young woman who hears what I am saying.

Whether people will hear that the way we form relationships today psychologically harms children.

That a psychologically wounded child becomes a psychologically wounded adult who often spends a lifetime trying to compensate through the misuse of power.

That this is why we attack one another in families and workplaces, why war rages within us — and what happens inside also happens outside: humanity wages war against itself, and human beings dominate nature in the same way.

We can stop now.

We can even reverse the course of humanity.

And the funny thing is that the understanding I am talking about is one of the greatest forms of enjoyment.

It is so deeply within us that every child knows it when they ask:

“Why?”

“Dad, why is that?”

“How did it come into existence?”

Understanding creates an extraordinary “aha!” experience.

I believe it can be a foundation for happiness, material security, deep friendship and genuine love.

Yet fear in society is so strong that by the time a small child becomes an adult, society has largely extinguished the practice of one of our most fundamental human capacities.

I have kept this very short, and many situations from my life that led me to the conclusions I have written about female love are missing.

But if what you have read interests you, there will be other opportunities to hear the rest of the story.

And also to find out what happens next.