When My Sisters Preach Truth

I love to share it.

One of the best parts about writing for Medium is what people comment. When they do, you learn a lot. Not only what they think about your writing, but also what it brings up for them. Not only that, but what they choose to share, sometimes with great and hilarious results, from their own lives.

I got a simply delightful comment the other day from Medium reader Brenda Young, who gave me permission to use this to share my sore belly muscles with other readers and writers. I’d written a piece that was a celebration of an extremely funny treatment of Tinder dating types by Elle Silver. Apparently, it hit fertile ground. That’s both sad and funny, and funny and sad.

Brenda, at 65, is two years younger than I am. Her experiences in the great wide world of dating after sixty seem to line up not only with mine, but also those of a few others whose words I’ve read on Medium and elsewhere.

In all fairness to the best of my fellow and much-respected male grey hairs whose lively motivation, athletic endeavors and personal dignity put them into categories all by themselves, this ain’t directed at you.

You know who you are.

This then is Brenda’s comment:

I’m telling ya. I was married to a great guy for twenty years until the good Lord took him. I read this, as well as witness what gal friends and relations are going through in the senior dating world and it gives me pause. Loose morals, light wallets, limp meat, lotta baggage, lotta baggage, lotta baggage. These men have hit the wall. Hard. At 65 I’m quitting while I’m ahead. Celibacy at this stage of life means never having to drag a Mr. geriatric ball and chain around. There is too much of the world to explore and I’m in the fortunate position to explore it in style so I’m traveling light.

It took me a while to stop laughing at that one. As with so many things, truth hurts.

Traveling light is what I hear more and more among the smartest and brightest of those Women of a Certain Age I know, or whose articles I read. It can be a different story entirely when it comes to Black women of a Certain Age, including those ten years younger. Vena Moore has written about this with real feeling, revealing what so many accomplished and educated women of color juggle once they lose a beloved partner or found themselves single by choice or simply by lack of choice, more like it.

And this is the part that isn’t funny. That so many of us, who like men (and men this age who like women, or same sex preferences) find dating later in life damned hard. Me too. We’re not alone. For as we live longer, many of us are divorcing more. That means more of us are finding ourselves a bit adrift, trying to manage dating life in a world most of us don’t recognize. We used to simply meet folks. Somehow, people don’t do that anymore. It isn’t just Covid. It’s that people seem to have forgotten the gentle art of approaching, conversing, befriending. Establishing commonality.

As in a reason to spend time together.

If you’re like me, you prefer to spend time investing in people. Not only does that seem to have gone by the wayside, current conditions make that vastly harder to say the least. Hell, even Brenda’s going to be challenged to travel light if we can’t travel at all.

Depending on who you are, if you’re like Brenda, above, she looks forward to traveling light.

This article from The Atlantic gives you an overview of the landscape:

From the article:

They (Helen Fisher et al, researchers) found that the single people least likely to compromise on attractiveness and feelings were those 60 and older. Fisher’s hypothesis is that older adults are less desperate to find partners than they may have been at a younger age — because they wanted someone to raise children with, or because they felt a societal pressure to partner up.

For some folks, the landscape and traveling light are just fine. For those for whom being paired up has greater meaning, this can be challenging. The good news is that so many of us have learned better skills at adulting, and are better at finding ways to cope, connect and take care of ourselves.

This time, what we have of it, assuming we’ve done some kind of decent job taking care of ourselves so that we have options, can offer so many new and different ways of being that we never perceived or felt capable of taking on before. For some, same sex relationships in a world more tolerant of them. For others, well, time to do some serious Me exploration time. It depends entirely on us, our options, funds, desires and whether Covid and quarantine come to some kind of an end.

As you and I age, we are more aware of how limited our time is on earth. It’s far less about producing offspring, and far more about quality time. With Covid and quarantine complicating matters further, this places even greater emphasis on how we spend that time, and with whom. The very real concerns about safety, not just about being scammed by increasingly sophisticated predators who know how to manipulate lonely older folks, but also people who don’t take Covid seriously.

It’s bad enough to not have acres of time ahead. It’s a lot worse to have that cut off because of carelessness. Lot of that going around right now.

Which, for many of us, means we continue to learn to really enjoy our own company. As with Brenda, I’m with her. I like the idea of traveling light. Well, that’s if we can find a way to travel again before we die of old age.

This is part of the PREACH I heard from Brenda, explained in in the final paragraph of the Atlantic article above:

Rhonda Lynn Way, the woman from Texas, has decided to pull back from dating for a while. “I don’t think there’s one love of your life,” she told me. “I think there’s love.” And she’s sharing love in all kinds of ways — reaching out to people in her community who seem like they need it, reminding her kids that she adores them, hosting spaghetti dinners for her Unitarian Universalist congregation. I asked her whether she was happy being single. “You come into this world by yourself, but somewhere along the line we get this idea that you’re part of a half,” she said. “You are whole all to yourself.”

Yes. You are.