Confessions of a Former Senior Cyber-Dater

A Story by John Edwards

Ruminations and reflections of the ups and downs of mid-life dating from one who's been there.

First, a bit of Irony...

As seniors, (my eyes still roll in disbelief at the sound of that), we are at a time and place when and where we are more free than we have been in decades, maybe more free than we have ever been (when you think about it). For most of us, our children are grown; if they are not out of the house completely and off starting and running their own lives, then they are at an age where perhaps the reins can be loosened a little, where constant vigilance, surveillance, and maintenance maybe isn’t quite as necessary as they used to be. There is no longer the threat of the house being burned down if you step out for a drink, or maybe even a movie. Parenting isn’t over (it never is), but surely the bulk of the work, the greasy, hands-on nitty-gritty dirty work, is somewhere in the past. The apron strings, figuratively, no longer need feel like tethers. Or umbilicals.

Likewise, we are settled into our careers, or we have at least established whatever path we are going to take professionally. Our education is complete, for the most part. We don’t have to study for finals, agonize over GPA’s. We have wisdom, we have maturity, we have experience, we have memories. We have benchmarks, we have signposts, we have guide posts. We’ve lived. We’ve loved. We’ve been hurt and wounded; we have wounded and we have hurt. We’ve made mistakes and, hopefully, learned something from them. We should be able distinguish lust --physical attraction-- from attraction of truer, deeper substance.

Dating should be easier than ever: We’re smart. We’re interesting. We have patina. We have character. Our inner selves --the beings that matter most-- have depth and dimension. We’ve seen things, done things; we’ve been places. We know our strengths, (should) accept our weaknesses, and realize that both give our lives shading and substance, color and light. We aren’t kids anymore. We’re adults. Worldly-wise. We should know what we want and what we don’t want.

And, yet, I admit that I don’t know. And as I peruse the profiles and study the photos of the ladies of my generation on my senior dating website likewise looking for love, I can see that I am not alone in my confusion. I may be alone come Friday night, and from what I see and sense, there are, unaccountably, a lot of us out there in that same lonely boat.

Clueless in Connecticut...

When I plunk my butt down in a booth in a restaurant for the inevitable first-date dinner, I am not sure I have anymore of a clue of want I want now than I did 30 years ago (in fact, I may have even less of a clue: For sure, 30 years ago, getting laid was almost always, if not always always, listed very high up on the menu).

It is easy enough to speak in generalities and say we all want the same things, and that we all want the same things we have ever wanted: We want to love and be loved; we want acceptance; we want validation; we want edification. We want to be swept off our feet and we want to do the sweeping; we want to find someone to live and die with and for; we want passion, we want romance; we want to walk moonlit shores hand-in-hand at midnight, kiss deeply, tenderly and madly as the surf sweeps warmly over our bare feet; we imagine making spontaneous, clothes-shredding, limb-twisting, heart-stopping, soul-shaking love in a spot in the sand not too far away from where that tide washed our feet; we want to cuddle, laugh, spoon on the sofa while watching movies; we want warmth, tenderness, closeness, intimacy at every level possible; we want casual and heavy conversation; searching, probing, knowing glances.

We all want, basically, happiness. And you would think, at this epoch, that we would be equipped with everything we need to find it, to know it, to have it and to keep it. So, why then, are so many of us still looking, if not so desperately, then certainly so urgently for it?

A Mean Old Man...

It’s kind of like this: When I was a kid we used to play ball in our own backyard. It was a small one though, so every once in a while a particularly well-struck shot would wind up in the adjacent yard of the archetypically sour and shriveled, wrinkled and cranky “mean old man.” Inevitably, at some point in the season, he would abscond with our ball and say we weren’t getting it back. He was sick of us a snot-nosed brats constantly climbing his fence and invading his turf.

It always struck me as petty to the point of psychotic. It was a whiffle ball, not a hard ball, not a bowling ball, not a cannon ball. It had a better chance of breaking wind than breaking a window. It was a threat to neither life, limb nor property. If the ball did hit a window, it issued a hollow, almost abashed report, then dropped listlessly to ground beneath it. The pane itself remained intact, impenetrable. And the yard, the lawn, was a weedy, Dust Bowl patch of nothing more dirt than grass. We weren’t invading Eden. It was an urban back lawn with rusting tin cans in it. Nothing more.

I couldn’t grasp the outrage, I couldn’t relate to sense of violation. This guy was an adult, a grown-up. He could do anything he wanted. Go anywhere he wanted. Be anything he wanted. He didn’t have to answer to anyone. He had money, a house, a car. He was boss. He was king. We were kids, nobodies. We were nothing; we had nothing. All we owned of value was a whiffle bat and ball and here was this guy, King of the World as far as we were concerned, confiscating it because, well, just because it suited his purpose. He could have chosen any action, set any course, responded in any number of free and easy ways. Heck, he could have joined us if he had so chosen "we could always use another player. But he chose to be a jerk. And why? Just because, it seemed, he could.

Well, I guess I learned as I got a little older myself that adults aren’t anywhere near as big and bad as I thought they were. They were every bit as small, puny and frightened, on some levels, as children are on their own. They don’t know everything. They don’t own everything. They are answerable to others. There are limits to their powers. There are limits to their lives. As I look back on it now, some of those lives seem even smaller than my own at the time. It was we, my brothers and I, who had the adventures, who both recklessly and willingly sallied forth into the unknown because, when you’re a kid, everything is the unknown. Every day is a new adventure, a new challenge. The mean old man next door suddenly looked small and sad, staking his claim on earth, marking his puny little patch of life, exerting his power and authority by depriving some urban poor and shabby boys of the baseball.

And so, here we are, a little shy of mean-old-manhood, but at an age wherein I thought every secret, every riddle, every mystery --if not of the universe, than at least of life--would all be solved to my own satisfaction. I thought, I hoped, by now that I would have someone, be with someone; I thought I would be wrapping up a long, healthy, happy life of love-making and home-making; looking forward to sailing off into the sunset of the golden years with the long-since found and conquered “Love of My Life.” I kind of expected, by now, to be like that guy in that lovely old song, “My Cup Runneth,” sitting in an easy chair in a den by a roaring fire, smoking a pipe, gray-haired and wrinkled, gazing lovingly over at the one who still makes my heart burn hotter and more beautifully than anything in that fireplace ever could. She knits, I adore, smoke my pipe and count my blessings.

If nothing else, when I set out on my journey a year ago or so to find her (because I didn’t have her), I thought I had all the knowledge, all the wisdom, all the brains, all the experience to make the finding her as easy as snapping up an errant whiffle ball from off a weedy, gravelly backyard.

Give myself a little credit "perhaps I do have those things. But the search has not been easy. It’s been fun, it’s been exciting; it’s had its moments of romance and intrigue. But because those are only ancillary benefits, and not ends in themselves, the search, thus far, has been a failure. I want to find someone I would jump back onto a sinking ship to be with; I want to find someone who’s willing to do the same for me, the notion, however dysfunctional, being that life without that person is unlivable.

Yeah, I want that. But, no, I haven’t found it.

Irony, Take Two...

Turns out, part what make that search so difficult is what is presumed to make it so easy: It is experience, it is memory, it is knowledge; it’s all the battles and wars waged and fought and lost and won. It is the caution that creeps in after enough blind-sides; it is the conservatism culled from incurring one or maybe two too many wounds. Chicks might dig scars, but the human spirit doesn’t. It doesn’t seek them out; it does its level best to avoid them.

So, while Babe A sitting across from you in that booth might look pretty hot and middle-aged tempting, and maybe your rather boyish inclination to sneak surreptitious peaks at her inviting cleavage cannot be reined in completely, and perhaps those peaks, 30 years ago, might have led you to take a different approach, now you say, Been there, done that. The cleavage says one thing. Now, maybe you’re just as concerned with what the eyes say. And they just seem a whole lot harder to read.

We are creatures of habit (even Thoreau bemoaned the alacrity with which he unwittingly and unwillingly carved a path in his journeys to and from his cabin and Walden Pond). We have our ways. We can be set in them. We have are zones. They are comfortable. Even if they aren’t so comfortable, they are ours. They are known and they suit us. Perhaps at this juncture of life, inviting, allowing and accommodating another in our Inner Sanctum seems too scary, too fraught with risk, too rife with peril. We long for the human touch, for companionship, for love, devotion and loyalty and all those godly traits that put us at least one up on the rest of the animal kingdom. What are willing to lose, if necessary, in order to attain it? That is the question. And it is not an easy one to answer.

So, what survives? What do we subsist on? Why do we persist? Because of hope, because the opiate of possibility and potential is a heady brew, and it gives just the push we need sometime to lay our hearts on the line one more time. The simple knowledge is the: The journey is worth it, because life is worth it, because love is worth it. And because we’re worth it