You and I Are Too Old to Still Believe That There is Only One Great Love in Life
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
“You robbed me of my rightful chances”
“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.”- Rhaina Cohen*
The last great ABBA song was One of Us back in 1981. One of the lines was the above sub-headline, an accusation that the love you have is actually robbing you of the better love that you should have had.
Really now. Is that the case?
That was well before the insipid swipe left of online dating, the easy trashing of the one we have for the better one that we believe we should have.
As if Mr. or Ms. Perfect even existed.
That perfect person might exist…in our overheated imagination, where what we think we deserve is likely not exactly what we need, as we swim upstream like a determined salmon to spawn.
For that matter, we may most assuredly sidestep someone who could end up being the best fit for our particular garden-variety neuroses.
So often we try so damned hard to push said Mr. or Ms. Perfect for Right Now out of the picture for the REAL Mr./Ms. Perfect, some construct that doesn’t exist, and end up alone anyway.
I love ABBA’s music but despise the lyrics, for a thousand good reasons. But then, I deeply dislike any and all sappy songs which underscore that I’MA GONNA DIE IF YOU LEAVE I’LL NEVER LOVE AGAIN OH WOE IS ME MY LIFE IS OVER FOREVERRRRRRRRRR….
As much as I might be a fan of the idea of romantic love, none of us is owed a rightful chance as it were. The chance we do have is that we are alive. As a consequence, we’re given the opportunity to experience love in all its myriad flavors and expressions.
Which, kindly, is infinite. Anyone who has ever loved an animal more than a human - you know who you are, peeps- know this. The love of solitude, or Nature, or that love of the first bite of your favorite dish, the love of the smell of fresh grass or cherry blossoms, or just….life.
Any perusal of
’s posts speaks to the love affair he and his camera have with the woods, its secrets and beauties, quite invisible to the hurried, impatient eye.What part of that isn’t love?
None of these hug back in that way we understandably would like, whether that’s mad, passionate romantic love or the deeply comfortable, endlessly- familiar warmth of bodies which have known one another for decades. In that familiarity lies great comfort and safety, even with the scars which are the inevitable tests of long-term love.
I will not have that, if for no other reason than I have aged out of the possibility of a fifty-year marriage. I’d be lucky to get ten. Hell, five, at this point.
There are times I’ll take five minutes, but that’s another article.
But what about family?
Is
any less of a woman because she didn’t have kids, or any of the rest of us greying gorgeous girls (or guys) less than because we are aging solo?Hell no.
But we are sold the idea of Prince/Princess Charming and the One True Love from, well, birth.
Lots of mind control in that.
I dreamed of it, wanted it, badly, in fact. My parents stayed together fifty years, but they most assuredly didn’t have that love either. My mother referred to their marriage as an “armed truce.”
They inhabited opposite ends of a long porch for sleeping quarters. I was a teenager before I knew that married people typically slept in the same bed.
Well, at least for a while they do.
If you farted like my big brother, your partner would sleep-walk out of the bedroom or sleep outside the tent just to be able to survive the onslaught, but I digress.
I used to believe that I was owed that One Great Love. At this point, that ship has sailed. It isn’t that I don’t believe that I won’t find a guy to care about since I am hetero.
It’s that I no longer buy the bullsh*t that all of us have to be partnered in one way or another to have experienced love.
What a crock.
You and I are WAY Too Old to believe that there’s only one kind of love, romantic love, and if we don’t find it, we are effectively worthless. Losers.
Who makes this crap up anyway?
People who sell Hallmark cards, flowers and chocolates, I guess. And rom- co(n)s, diamonds (which were always a scam, just saying) and everything else that people make money off by selling us the epic lie of The One True and Only Love.
Cohen writes:
It can be confusing to live in the gulf between the life you have and the life you believe you’re supposed to be living.
This cuts right to the quick, that notion that here I am 71, nobody loves me,
WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.
Look, I’ve been there. I’ve felt that. But the older I get, the less likely it is that some aging Prince Charming might clop up on an ancient mule and risk hurting his back by handing me a faded rose.
On the other hand, the more likely it is that I get to expand exponentially into all the other loves, like
Love of writing. Being of service. Massaging animals. Mentoring. Taking care of my yard. Trips to the Coast every Wednesday.
Getting back on the adventure trail. Hitting the weights and the BOSU ball every day at the YMCA. Rebuilding my strength, trying out new sports and skills and pushing my limits.
New friends. New experiences, being a beginner over and over.
Oh I could go on. And on and on and ON.
All those new friends who are kind enough to open their lives and time to me?
Those are loves, too. Those are a lot more available than aging Chippendale dancers with lower back problems from all those women jerking on their shorts.
Or whatever it is they’re grabbing.
How incredibly small we make ourselves when we squeeze our infinite capacity for love into a narrow lane called “ONE TRUE LOVE,” thereby shutting out every other possibility from friendship to furballs.
There really is only One True Love, after all, if we’re going to call things what they are.
That is the love affair made available to us for being born, for being given a life, for the opportunity to learn to revel in life instead of curl into a ball of complaints about what life owes us.
We get love when we give it. When we love life, and that means all that it hands us, we get love back tenfold.
Lose a loved one to suicide? Me too. Lose the love of your life in your twenties to a plane crash? Check. Rape and incest? Check. Bankruptcy? Check. OCDs so serious they ruined health, finances and mental balance? Check, check, check. Accidents so serious you were almost killed? Check. Thirty-two root canals and still lose all your teeth? Check.
That’s my partial list. Any one of those might leave folks bitter, angry and resentful. What surprises me is that I am more grateful, more in love with life the more life heaps on my greying conk.
Everybody has shit in their bucket. You may have had worse, maybe not. Plenty of folks have had far worse, and they still manage to celebrate being alive.
We do have one true love. That is the gift of waking up each day.
I won’t insult you by trying to convince you to be thankful that someone close to you died. I won’t insult you by telling you that you should leap for joy that you lost that job and then your house.
No. But I will invite you to see beyond those immediate circumstances and understand that you were given life.
That is an act of love so profound we often miss it entirely.
I’d love to fall in love, to be held and kissed and cuddled. I have released that to the Universe at large.
In return I have received so many other things that now take up the space that I used to reserve ONLY for PC. That would be Prince Charming, not Politically Correct. Although if he does show up as the PC PC I might slam the door in his face.
Meanwhile, I’ll take the hugs from friends, furballs, snowflakes (including human ones), sunshine, and my aging teddy bear Gerry.
Let's play.
Thank you for taking time out of your life to hang out here. If this works for you, please consider
And if it continues to serve and feed your soul, please also consider throwing pennies on my deck. You have a LOT of choices, and anything you pay for needs to add value
If you have someone in your life who can use a reminder of their intrinsic lovability with or without that Magic Someone, please consider
Above all, for god’s sake don’t wait. Just live.
*The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen
so many kinds of love brought out in your essay, Julia, as for me, this being single business is foreign and unappreciated, but my own doing so until I make my way back home to find my later life woman. my camera and i enjoy our time together in the forest.
I so appreciate the power in your writing. The words leap out of my phone.