How to Attract the One: Advice from an Old, Married Woman

2023-02-15T17:43:16Z

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and my husband and I — near to the celebration of 23 years of marriage — mostly forgot about it. Back in the day, Valentine’s was serious business and we went to great lengths to spend it in each other’s arms. Nowadays? Meh. My parents, who have been married for 55 years, had a similarly uneventful Valentine’s spent on the couch watching Netflix. Neither my parents nor my husband and I went out to dinner. We did not open bottles of champagne. For me and my father, the breadwinners of our respective households, it was a work day. Valentine’s night was just another night. As horrified as young (and old) romantics may be to read the above paragraph, this is what aging and marriage look like when they are successful.

Uh-oh...

As a young woman, I was not exactly the sort to wear a purity ring and save myself for marriage. I started dating in high school when I was sixteen and violently insecure. My relationships back then, much like the relationships of all my friends, were fraught with nightmarish drama and stupidity. Though I always made it a point never to go after a man who was married or even seriously engaged, I cheated on two of my steady boyfriends. I had a definite pattern of becoming entrapped by men for whom I only felt lukewarm affection. These relationships quickly turned into co-dependent dysfunction: they depended on me to dole out favors, sexual and otherwise, and I depended on them to drive me around and come to my emotional rescue when I inevitably crashed off a self-manufactured trip. I didn’t need illegal drugs or excessive amounts of alcohol to ride the rollercoaster.

By the time I was 24, I had finally had enough and decided I would date a poor man who was living in his aunt’s garage. This was certainly not the smartest thing I could do, but all things considered, the poor guy was the only one who had ever written me a poem, felt it necessary to open doors (even car doors) when we were on dates, and in general could grok the kind of darkness I was born with. I had my choice and proposals from much wealthier men, but I turned them down, perhaps foolishly. I chose him over the others because he was the only one with whom I felt a soul connection.

We married when I was 26 and he was 40. To make a long story short, it has been a different roller coaster ride ever since. I had to get over my savior complex and the idea that I could fix absolutely everything by my extreme genius. He had to overcome plenty of personal issues as well, though I will not list them as it is his story to tell and not mine. My husband and I have had many battles: this is a result of us both being exceptionally stubborn and strong-willed. The marriage has been severely tested and it has not always come out the better for it. The same is true of my parents’ marriage. Now that we stare down the barrel of old age, we watch as most of what held us together as young people — physical attraction, hopeful potential, and youthful insecurity — crumbles away and we are left with the foundation of what drew us together in the first place. In our odd case, it was an understanding of each other's darkness.

Etheric Energy and Attraction

I have had the gift/curse of a great deal of etheric energy and fairly good looks in my life, now fading and reshaping itself as I enter my own childless, post-menopause reality. This energy used to provoke vicious jealousy among women and gay men who would often stop at nothing to undermine me. There is no way of being friends with someone who is constantly cursing you in their subconscious, and that’s why I can count my friends on one hand. Now that I have more of a bird’s eye view of this dynamic, I understand that etheric energy is the key to attracting mates. What I mean is that if you understand how to increase your own etheric energy, you will have no trouble attracting mates.

As I have talked about in previous essays, etheric starvation is the commonest malady of our time. When you live in an ugly environment, eat processed and devitalized food, and practice ingratitude on the regular, you are nearly guaranteed to suffer etheric starvation and the addictive, self-medicating behavior that is the natural result of that starvation. Young people are usually overflowing with etheric-plane energy, and that is why the old crave the company of the young.

It follows that if you are single and seeking a mate, no matter what your age, you should improve your etheric plane energy as much as possible. In order to do so, we are going to look into one of the concepts behind my Ogham tiles. For those who know me, I use the Ogham as a system of divination. The Ogham are kind of like runes because they have letters based on various trees. Each tree’s symbolism gives you a direction not only for meditation but for seeing the trend in which your life is leaning. The letter du jour for the single who seek a love that lasts is Saille, the Willow.

The Lessons of Saille: The Willow Tree

The willow tree has a curious property in that it can bend without breaking. When my husband and I moved into our house eight years ago, the yard was tabula rasa with waist-high grass and no trees except two dead elms that sadly had to come down as they were about to fall on the roof. We had no money for landscaping, but thanks to a now-beloved neighbor, I got some donated trimmings from her pussy willow. I stuck about 10 sticks rudely into the mud slick in the part of our yard that used to pool with water whenever a heavy rain came. Willows are water-lovers, and the sad little pile of sticks grew in four short years into a massive tree. The pussy willow became larger than its parent plant and now towers over the garden shed and provides shelter for birds while cutting winds that used to race through the yard. The willow’s strength, like a good marriage, is in its ability to bend without breaking.

The willow, ruled by Aphrodite, is a tree of feminine grace and etheric flow. Aphrodite once graced me with a tidbit of knowledge worth exploring: the idea that in order to experience true love, we must eliminate all distractions, including the good things we are affectionate towards yet lukewarm about. The goal of a single person who wants the kind of lasting marriage enjoyed by my husband and myself and my parents needs to first amass etheric energy in order to attract multiple candidates for marriage. The second step is the obvious one of figuring out the question of Who is the One? The third step is to ruthlessly eliminate all that would stand in the way of successfully pairing off and to focus on the common interest of you both, hopefully until the end of your current mortal incarnation. This means axing all other love interests and setting them free to their destinies with other people. It may mean letting go of friends whose lifestyle is not akin to the monogamous one you seek.

Make the Most of What You've Got

Whether old or young, in order to attract mates, we need to first and foremost make the most of what we’ve got on the physical plane. I am not talking about dramatic plastic surgery overhauls here unless you’ve got a legitimate physical deformity such as a second set of vestigial arms. If you are flabby, it is time for an exercise routine. If you are a bit of a slob, it’s time to invest in the time it takes to brush your teeth twice a day and to bathe enough to smell good head to toe. If you cannot cook a meal from scratch, it is time to learn. By improving yourself, you make yourself far more attractive to your potential mate. You’ve got to give them something to work with and also show them you care about the details in life. Quert is another tree card that is sacred to Aphrodite in the Ogham. Quert is the Apple, another hardy, resilient tree. In my Ogham, it means Delight or all of the tiny courtesies and moments of gratitude that make civilization civilized. God is in the details and Quert is detail-oriented. She is the tassel on the shiny knob that doesn’t need to be there for any reason except that it is joyful and colorful. She is the generous tip given by a person who cannot really afford it to the excellent waiter who happened to need it that day. She is the mother who brightened her elderly neighbor’s day by having her children draw a picture for him and sign their names to it. She is the lover who cheers his mate up after a long and terrible day with a silly joke learned from the internet. Build what is best and most positive about yourself and you’ll attract the One who is right for you. It may take a while but it will happen.

Taking up a protective ritual such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or the Sphere of Protection is one of the few surefire ways of managing your etheric energy and amplifying it over time. If you are single and wanting a mate, a daily protective ritual can be extremely helpful as it takes what energy you’ve amassed and protects it while you work on improving yourself on subtler planes. When you think about it, banishing rituals are magical shapes drawn in the air that act as seals (there is a good reason why those ornate symbols are called “seals”) to lock in both etheric and astral plane energy and to fend off nasty etheric and astral gunk that would siphon it off for nefarious purposes. As you develop your positive habit of doing a protective ritual, you will also come to understand more about yourself, which will be crucial to making a relationship work long-term.

The second habit that should be de rigueur for the One who seeks the One is discursive meditation. Only by knowing yourself will you know the One when you find him or her, that’s logic — blunt as hell. Even the best of marriages has its share of conflict: trust me on this one. You are going to need to know all of your own best and worst tendencies well in advance if you seek a lasting partnership in this day and age. The collective astral is the worst that it has been in tens of thousands of years. It ain’t easy for a marriage to survive in the best of times, and we are currently in the worst of times, at least on the astral plane.

Habit two and a half is divination: tarot, Ogham, runes, scrying, or whatever floats your boat. I say two and a half because divination isn’t worth your efforts until you’ve spent a good amount of time in the discursive meditation chair. In the case of divination, it is truly better if you use divination after you’ve become good at discursive meditation and not a moment before.

The third habit, and perhaps the most essential of all, is the cultivation of gratitude. By becoming grateful for all of the little things that most people take for granted, you will make yourself into hot property whenever you so much as enter a room where your potential life mate dwells. My husband’s poor boy gratitude for things like restaurant pancakes are what separated him from the others in the beginning of our relationship. To other boyfriends, restaurant pancakes were mediocre sustenance wolfed down without thought as they stumbled blindly into disease and/or morbid obesity. For my then-future husband, they were precious manna from heaven. When someone is grateful for small things and shows it without embarrassment because it is their “normal”, it is a good indication they will be grateful for you and all your quirks long-term. We all desire the grateful person most of all because we all want to be appreciated. Gratitude is what keeps a marriage kind and gentle, two traits beloved by Aphrodite from what little I can tell.

So there you go — my advice for catching that elusive mate and keeping him or her. Happy Nothingburger Valentine’s to you and best wishes on the road to true love.

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Kimberly Steele

How to Attract the One: Advice from an Old, Married Woman