Food and the Loss of Love
I read a notice that said that one in four women between the ages of 18 and 22 have a food problem. I'd say there's at least two or three in four, from my experience of young women and women—and not just young women between 18 and 22 either. It's such a widespread problem.
Why do young women between 18 and 22 have a food problem? Food problem means a nice way of saying stuffing yourself sick until you're sick, making yourself sick, stuffing yourself again—bulimia, it's called. And then there's another one where you starve yourself, anorexia. Why does this happen to young women?
I'll put forward an idea for you. Only an idea, but you probably have this idea anyway. But I'm going to give you the idea, not the concept.
You see, all young women are romantic. They start off being romantic. They are beautiful. They're the most beautiful creatures, young girls, really, inwardly. Their inner impulse is romance—to have romantic love, to be loved and to love romantically. This is every young girl's desire from within, because they're different creatures. They're a different species to man, absolutely. Woman's a different species, absolutely, to man. Two arms, two legs and a head—that's the end of it.
It is inevitable in this existence that every young woman's dreams of romance are going to be punctured. It is inevitable. Often it happens in childhood, possibly through sexual abuse. It's always trying to get her—the sexual drive, man's sexual drive. It can be from that which will tend to puncture it, although she'll try to overcome that to the best of her capability. She'll try to overcome that and dream of a true lover coming to rescue her. But really, the damage has been done emotionally inside of her. Her dream of romance has been emotionally punctured, and she carries that forward, still with a bit of the dream.
And then she gets into sexual relationship with an awkward, unloving, sexually driven bravado—and all the rest are descriptions of a teenage man making love. She gets into his clutches, inevitably, sooner or later. He's going to deflower her, and be very proud about the number he's deflowered too, and the rest of it. But the point for her is that she started off with this great knowledge of love, which is really what it is. Her love of romance is really woman's great knowledge of love, because woman has more knowledge of love than man will ever have, because she is love. She's fundamentally love, before she's corrupted by society and thoughts and all the psychic level there of insecurity, self-doubt, resentment, jealousy, and all the rest of that stuff that sits on her. But before all that stuff happens, when she's young and impressionable, she's a romantic. She's beautiful because she's innocent. It only means she's innocent in her aspirations. It doesn't mean that she's really fundamentally innocent, because no one is born innocent. You hear about innocent women and children—not true. Everyone's born with a potential of corruptibility, which is certainly going to happen. But this romantic idea of woman is so beautiful for her, and when it's punctured and she carries it forward, trying to find some love in man from the teenage years and up to 18, let's say—that's only the figures that they give us—but let's say she tries and experiments with man to try to find something that is fulfilling, which conforms with her idea of romance and love. But because it doesn't exist, really, until the man comes to his senses and really learns to love.
By the time she's 18 to 22—and I can tell you it goes on from 22 right on and on and on—this food problem is because she has a hole in her. She's got a hole right in the middle of her psycho-anatomy, and that reflects in her body, and she tries to fill it and stuff it with something that is reassuring. This is the reason for it. And of course, she can't find that, because every time she finds a man who truly loves her, as much as he does at the time, she is likely to not have the problem. It gradually diminishes as she finds that he loves her and looks after her and cares for her. The problem is likely to stop at that time. But the unfortunate thing is that man's love is not very enduring, usually, or his interest is not enduring. And if she senses that, then she's going to binge on, or it's going to break up and still she'll binge on, because she's trying to fill an unfillable hole.
It doesn't happen to every young woman. I'm not saying that, but I'm telling you what the cause is, because, you see, food is the closest thing to these bodies, to love. I'm not saying breathing—and breathing, of course, is fundamental to us—but I'm talking about something that you can take into your body. And love is something, certainly, that you take into your body from another. And food is the comforter, isn't it? We love, on a cold day, warm food. We love a warm drink. We just love food. And naturally, because the body needs food; it doesn't want food. It's the self that wants food. It's the body that needs food, and when the body has had enough food, the body would stop eating. But we have selves in us who are gluttonous to some degree or other, and tend to overeat. The self tends to overeat. That's not everybody. But the self tends to overeat, not the body, because the self is trying to get some satisfaction in the unfillable part, some satisfaction, some security that's lasting. And of course, the desire for food is not lasting, because it rises again.
But the love of man is very rare on this earth. It is made that way because man is the most structured of the two creatures, the two species. He gets structured, and therefore he's more habitual than woman, much more habitual than woman, because he's more structured and he lives in his structure. And so he can become familiar without knowing it. He can take her for granted without knowing it. He says, 'What do you mean? I love you.' And she says, 'Yes, but it's not enough.' 'The way you're loving me?' 'What do you mean it's not enough? Don't I do everything I can for you?' 'Yes, you do, but it's not enough to just love me like you are doing.'
If he's got any sense, he'd say, 'Tell me, because I'm a structured, sort of robotic sort of guy. What am I not doing right? Why is it not enough for you?' 'Oh, it is enough. You do love me. I don't doubt that. But it's got the danger of becoming familiar, or taking it for granted,' she would say. And the man, of course, if he's a man, would keep listening to her. And because he keeps listening to her, the woman would never—the woman I'm talking about, which is you women—would never take advantage of his humility in saying, 'What is it? What can I do?' She would only say what was the fact and the truth of the matter, to endeavour to restore something that is beautiful between the two, so that it doesn't become boring, taken for granted, familiar, and all those words which woman, in her radical being inside, hates and fears.
That's the truth of it. Man gets so structured that he can't listen and won't listen, because he's got a forceful authority which overwhelms woman. Woman doesn't have the same structured, forceful authority that man has because of our paternalistic background. All this, all religions—paternalistic, everything. There's no religion founded by a woman that has any meaning. Paternalistic. So it's structured. Every religion is structured. Buddhism, the whole lot, is structured, based on the past. And the past is a structure. You've got to pull it down. You've got to destroy it. You've got to destroy it. And you've got to say, 'Tell me the truth. Now, what is it that I'm not doing? Tell me now.'
Not, 'Oh, well, you've got to live the Eightfold Path or something,' or, 'You've got to live the Ten Commandments,' or, 'You've got to live what the Sermon on the Mount says.' I say to this – were you there? Were you with the Sermon on the Mount when he gave it? Were you with Buddha when Buddha realised nothing arising and realised Nirvana, or whatever he realised? Were you there? Were you there when the Upanishads were first mouthed by whatever master? Were you there? And the answer is, 'No, I wasn't.' But don't you know that that's the only reality: when you're there. The rest of it is historical bullshit, and it's got to mislead you. It's going to mislead you. Every teaching based on the past is going to mislead you. But you haven't got the intelligence to see that, so you want ways and paths, and follow Buddhism or Muslimism or Christianity or Zoroasterism, or some other asterism, instead of being now. This is where it all is. This is where my life is. Here. Now.
Barry and Eckhart