While recently in London I was sitting on a train when a couple got on aged in their late 70’s or perhaps 80’s. The man and woman were about the same height and it was evident they had been married for a very long time. They sat side by side, the husband reading a book, while the wife read the newspaper, and their communication one to the other in silence was so complete it was wondrous to watch. I began to think about love, about the differences between men and women and how the coming together of two opposites in a marriage, like the marriage of the couple I was watching, can result in such communication.

In today’s society divorce is rampant (more than 50% of marriages end in divorce), and people in our modern culture seem unable to put up with anything less than the ideal picture they have created in their imaginative thinking of what they think a future husband or wife would be like for them. Perhaps in our modern age we are just too selfish to allow for tolerance of the foibles of the other, perhaps we do not know or respect ourselves enough that we can allow for the other to not be the perfect ideal. Plus with the proliferation of pornography in our culture which many think is the opposite of Eros and is in fact related to Thanatos, the death instinct, it is becoming nearly impossible for men to view the individual woman as an individual in her own right quite apart from their imaginative fantasies of what they think a woman is or should be to complement their imperfect ego. Women, for their part, may have built an imaginative picture of a man that does not exist in real life (the romantic partner as portrayed in books, magazines and films).

Thinking about something I read long ago by Rudolf Steiner when speaking to the differences between the sexes, he explained: men when they incarnate, incarnate heavily into the materialistic, whereas women incarnate only slightly into the material world and still remain somewhat in the spiritual world. Thinking of this makes it a lot easier to understand the obsession some men may have with pornography and the ideal of love that many women may live with and find hard to find. Our current culture is so deeply embedded in the materialistic that one wonders how many eons of time will have to pass before humankind works their way through the love of materialism in all its aspects (many negative) into something more spiritual and fulfilling.

Back to the couple on the train. They grew up in a time when there was no internet, no vast media (no dominate television and a vast array of all manner of newspapers) to fill their world with delusional thinking, thinking that has no real basis and value for who we really are as human beings, so therefore this couple were able to meet as two human beings and find in the other something of goodness and value despite their sexual differences and accept the humanity of the other which meant allowing for some small foibles in the other that many of us would not tolerate today in a partner. If men incarnate deeply into the material and women incarnate with their self remaining for a large part in the spiritual world, then the joining together in love (Eros as romantic or sexual love) would create a third being that was the combination of both. This is the beautiful being you sense in the silence between this couple on the train. 

Best to all.
Cheers,
Patri