Eknath Easwaran's Commentary
To excel in anything you have to have patience; but if you want to love, patience is an absolute necessity. You may be dashing, glamorous, fascinating, and alluring; you may be tall, dark, and handsome, or whatever the current fancy may be. Without patience, you can never become a great lover; it would be a contradiction in terms.
“Well,” most of us say, “I guess that leaves me out. Patience has never been my strong point.” Very, very few of us are born patient. Our age has been called the age of anxiety, the age of anger; but we could just as easily say the age of impatience. You see it in supermarket lines, on the highway, on the tennis court, in the schoolyard, in the political arena, on the bus. With all this we have begun to believe that impatience is our natural state. Fortunately, love is our natural state, and patience is something that everybody can learn.