CRAZY isn't it, you think you've grown up but it only takes a few weeks back on the open market and you're acting like a fourteen year old again - despite the evidence of the mirror. Of course, this is all cliche - so many of us have been there done that - but the point about a cliche is that it does encapsulate experiences that are common to us all.
So here we are we have hit fifty (and older) we have been divorced, separated, widowed we've been on Guardian Soulmates, Friends Reunited, every bloody internet dating thing we can go on. We alternate between despair that we'll never find anyone (there's safety in that) or despair that we will find someone and then (help!) how do we handle that....finding and not finding seem to be as fraught with problems as each other.
You don't find someone and, especially if you are a woman you are consigned to family dinners where you are sat next to another maiden aunt of eighty (nothing wrong with that except that you are not eighty quite yet), married friends don't invite you to supper parties because they fear you running off with their partners who do, in fact, make passes at you given the opportunity, and the only folk you go out with are other female friends in their fifties and early sixties to go and see Mama Mia and sing-a-long in a brave show of sisterly solidarity!
You do find someone and all the problems that you experienced in your youth rear their ugly head and threaten to de-rail your new relationship before it even gets a full steam up. Let's face it, unless you were an uber confident teenager, most of us got it wrong most of the time but you sort of stumbled on in a youthful haze. This time round there are no excuses, you're supposed to be mature, capable, adept - but you're not. Instead you are plagued by questions like: where do you go on a first date in your 50/60s when it's freezing outside, what do you do if the beer you've drunk in a warm pub makes you feel drowsy and you start not to hear what your potential squeeze (that's a new modern word I recently learnt)is saying because you're trying to stay awake. When is the right date for the first kiss....etc, etc, etc.
I've tried to glean help from various book MEN ARE FROM MARS among them, but somehow all the helpful advice they give just flies out of my head as soon as I am in the REAL situation. I can't remember any of the scripts (perhaps I should write them on the back of my hand next time). And anyway, how do you recognise when the man is ready to go back in his cave, I always thought you were meant to go in and chase them out otherwise they'd still be there and the Industrial Revolution would never have happened.
The best advice I've ever been given is 'you only need one house buyer'. Maybe I'll be re-posessed soon!
