As more and more women find themselves without partners, for short or longer periods of time, the quest for finding that love, the fulfilling love that a woman longs for, becomes a pressing personal and even societal need. It was interesting for me to read an Orthodox saint quoting that it is the love of our Divine Father God, that a man can allow to flow through him and touch a woman's heart. This is the love that many women long to find. Well, the good news is that we can have direct access to it, even without a partner.In an ideal world, it would be preferable for some to receive an aspect of this love from a loving, caring partner. This would be love between masculine and feminine manifested in the physical world. Well, this is not an ideal world, the statistics are not in our favor and many men have lost memory of this ancient promise... But even if there isn't a loving partner to remind us of God's love, it is not the end of the world. We can still access that love of God ourselves. Interestingly, we know how to do it. We know.We do it all the time, when we give this love to others. It is a matter of decision to give it to ourselves.
One way is to remember to give this love to ourselves on a daily basis. I found that four times daily in prayer/contemplation are necessary to get in touch with this spiritual source of love in order to charge up and to get in touch with our needs and wants (although each woman can decide for herself which frequency suits her best). It has to be frequent though. Just as a healthy loving couple would communicate lovingly several times a day (morning, lunch, afternoon, evening, night). so single women should give themselves this loving attenndance regularly and not forget about it. One mistake we make is that we give an extra dose of self love on a special occasion (during a weekend trip for example) and then completely forget about ourselves for the rest of the week.But this is an important principle of love, the principle of continuity.
Another principle is that of protection. We get educated, we ask for help, about all the practical ways to help ourselves survive in this world.As one recently divorced woman put it, 'When I separated, I thought I wouldn't be able to walk out of the house alone'. Yet, she did. Little by little, she learnt how to do the little errands of everyday life, how to earn money for herself and her daughter, how to fill in tax forms and sell property, all the little things that terrified her before and her husband took care of. And she found that she was more protected than she thought.
The third principle is that of affection. It is all these words that we long to hear:"I love you, I miss you, you mean so much to me etc". There is so much investment in these words that some women view them as dangerous and are downright suspicious about anyone who spurts them out easily. Well, we can still tell these words to ourselves, though speech, acts, art, gifts, we can still say these words to ourselves in a creative way.Or allow God to whiper these words to us in His own way.They don't only count if said by another person.They count if said by us too.
The three principles: continuity, protection, affection. God's love for us certainly fulfils these criteria and it is up to us to claim it for ourselves. Even without a partner.
Victoria Prekate, 6/7/2021
