This is an excerpt From The Authentic Heart: An Eightfold Path to Midlife Love (John Wiley & Sons, 2001). John Amodeo, PhD, is also the author of Love & Betrayal and coauthor of Being Intimate. John is a Bay Area psychotherapist and longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister in our Counseling & Therapy category.

To be human is to long for love. We want to feel close, connected, and cared about. But sadly, love relationships often leave us disheartened, cynical, or angry. Much pain and confusion stem from unrealistic attitudes about love and romance. We don't understand what it really takes to love and be loved.

Satisfying relationships don't just happen. Loving partnerships and friendships are created and maintained through a commitment to a certain path of growth. The search for love is simultaneously a search for ourselves.

Midlife holds the extraordinary potential of becoming more fully awake and alive — more wholeheartedly available to give and receive love. By being committed to relationships of equality and respect, you have a precious opportunity to unearth rare treasures.

Having danced in the light and wrestled with the darkness, you can now take time to integrate what you've learned throughout your life. Perhaps you carry scars and baggage from romantic misadventures. But rather than abandon love and retreat to a world that's safe, but sterile, you can make the most of midlife as a time to open your heart and free your imagination, while planting your feet firmly on the ground. It's a time to re-capture your innocence, yet newly integrated with the compassion born of sorrow and wisdom born of mistakes.

It's a time to complete whatever grieving remains from jagged partings of the past. It's a time to value yourself as you are rather than shape yourself according to others' expectations. And it's a time to move toward a wise innocence — authentic love for grown-ups.

Pursuing love is dangerous. You can get hurt. It's reserved for the adventurous — those willing to risk getting hurt again to reap the rewards of authentic love. Yet, as you grow toward midlife and beyond, your heart can be increasingly fortified by the wisdom and discernment that come with experience. Courageous people in midlife hold a mature vision of possibilities.

They're willing to take intelligent risks. Perhaps they long for the shimmering delight of searching into their partner's eyes, or gently holding each other while gazing at the night sky, or lovemaking electrified by connecting from the heart. These brave souls have tasted the heartbreak of rejection and separation — perhaps knowing more than their share of adversity. Yet these wounded warriors of love are willing to learn from their pain and misfortune rather than diminish themselves by retreating from others or concluding that love isn't for them.

The path of growth that leads to midlife love opens your heart and strengthens your spirit. It opens you to life, even if no partner comes right away — or ever. The risk of closing yourself to love is that you close your heart to life. The courage to pursue the path of love simultaneously opens you to the mystery and magic of being alive.

Is your heart sometimes heavy, your mind restless, and your soul searching? Or, are you simply wanting more love and joy in your life? Then you're ready to ask these crucial questions:

1. What's really important in life?

2. Do I need new priorities?

3. What's getting in the way of the deeper connections I want with people?

4. Am I doing something that's pushing people away?

5. Are my expectations too high in some ways and too low in others?

6. What can relationships provide for me, and what do I need to do for myself?

Allowing these questions to incubate in your heart and mind can reap realizations that lead to a new era of loving.

In young love, we believe that we have only to find the right partner — then we can merrily ride off into the sunset. As a mature person seeking love, we must come to realize that a climate for love must be created between two people who know themselves fairly well, and who are willing to do the personal and interpersonal work that creates the grounding for a satisfying, lasting relationship.

The possibility of deep, authentic loving can only dawn as you lose hope in the innocent romantic views that masqueraded as true love. You must lose faith not in love itself, but in true love's alluring cousin: naive, romantic love. Midlife is a time to move toward love that is more stable and less hazardous to your health. And, perhaps more difficult to recognize, it's a time when you become less hazardous to others.

In young love, we believe that we have only to find the right partner — then merrily ride off into the sunset. As a mature person seeking love, you must come to realize that a climate for love must be created between two people who know themselves fairly well, and who are willing to do the personal and interpersonal work that creates the grounding for a satisfying, lasting relationship. A partner augments the life and love that already exist within us.