out. But when the appointed time comes, she may be engrossed in
something or someone else.
Although the lessons are painful, experience is the best teacher
for an Aphrodite woman. She learns that people get hurt and angry
when she treats them as “out of sight, out of mind.” When she
doesn’t think her financial situation through before impulsively
buying what catches her eye, she finds that charge accounts get out
of hand and dunning letters arrive. She repeats patterns that cause
pain for herself and others, until she learns to resist the tyranny of
the here-and-now, which has been leading her to live as if there were
no tomorrow.
When an Aphrodite woman learns to reflect on the consequences
before she acts, she will respond somewhat less impulsively and
behave more responsibly. However, emotional priorities will contin-
ue to carry more weight than practical considerations. And she may
still hurt others by her behavior, even when she deliberates on her
course of action beforehand, because she ultimately follows her
heart.
CASUALTIES OF LOVE
Men may become casualties when an Aphrodite woman “loves
them and leaves them.” She falls in love very easily, each time sin-
cerely convinced that she has found the perfect man. In the magic
of the moment, he may feel himself a god in love with a goddess,
only to be dropped and replaced. As a consequence, she leaves in
her wake a series of wounded, rejected, depressed, or angry men
who feel used and discarded.
An Aphrodite woman may go through a series of intense love af-
fairs, swept up each time by the magic (or archetypal experience) of
being in love. To end this pattern, she must learn to love someone
“warts and all”—someone who is an imperfect human rather than
a god. First she must become disenchanted with facile infatuations;
usually only experience can bring about such disillusionment. Only
then can she stay in a relationship long enough to accept the human
flaws in her partner and herself and to discover the human dimen-
sions of love.
Goddesses in Everywoman