Love - The Second Time Around

The seven personality types are within each and everyone of us. We have a dominant persona - our facade that we show to the world - and most of us activate at least one or two others frequently.

Many people come to me believing their life is over at anything from thirty-five to fifty-five. Why? Because their partner has left them. Nobody has told them about love the second time around. No one has told them that love is like the measles - all the worse when it comes late in life.

Falling in love is no different at fifteen than it is at seventy-five. There are still the same old emotions whirring around inside us. One's heart still feels so large that it might burst.

To quote Lynda Barry, If it is your time love will track you down like a cruise missile. If you say `No! I don't want it right now.' That's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.

A lament I frequently hear from men is: `Who would want a forty-year-old bloke with a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old living with me?' `That's easy, a woman with a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old'. I reply, as though I had been asked a riddle.

Women with children often request not to be introduced to men without children; because, `he rings up at the last minute and expects me to drop everything to go out that night. He can't comprehend the difficulties of finding a baby sitter at short notice - the commitment to one's children and their activities; and that when you have young children, you are on call twenty-four hours a day.

Another fallacy that seems to affect women, in particular, is that once over forty they have `had it'. Every time I hear of a woman who has been told, `there is little hope of meeting a partner once you are over forty', it makes me so cross.

Your adult life began at twenty. At forty you have only lived twenty years; with modern medicine, you probably have at least another forty years to go. And you will not be on your own; there are many others in the same boat. People with a problem, too often, think that they are the only ones. All the baby-boomers are turning fifty; that means a population explosion of fifty-year-olds - many of them single.

Falling in love the second time around is not very different from that heart stirring experience at fifteen. Those who threw caution to the wind in their teens will probably do it all over again at fifty.

Julian Barnes wrote: People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions; the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

The more reserved person likes to feel his way, allows love to creep up on him slowly But although his may be a less spontaneous reaction, before he knows it, he is: head over heels; completely gone; seeing life through rose coloured glasses; a walking encyclopedia on her virtues.

Madame de Stael wrote, `We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us'. And this happens (fortunately it is only a temporary state of affairs), to many people who have just been through the agonies of ending a relationship or marriage.

No man is an island. We all need love and affection and we also need to give. If you believe that life will be better it will. Cut short your mourning time to make way for your next experience. The longer you mourn, the harder it is to break the habit.

Nancy Mitford said, `To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease'. It certainly will not take if you do not believe you are worthy or you are in a melancholy state.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: Whoso loves, believes the impossible. Everyone who is in love believes it is a miracle, and people are falling in love everyday - miracles happen every day.

When, a fellow who came to me in tears (doubting whether he will ever be happy again), telephones to say, `She is just what I have been looking for - and twice as pretty. We are going out again tomorrow night. I would love to send her flowers, do you think it's OK?' he does not speak in monotones or a pathetic I-feel-sorry-for-me voice, he says it with exuberance. His air of: confidence; I believe in miracles; I'm going to cease the day stirs others with enthusiasm too.

PG Wodehouse describes it aptly in Spring Fever: `Love', she said, `seems to pump me full of vitamins. It makes me feel as if the sun were shining and my hat was right and my shoes were right and my frock was right and my stockings were right, and somebody had just left me ten thousand a year'.

Rosalind Neville is author of Dial A Woman and Dial A Man and principle of ENTRE NOUS (Introduction Service).

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