Finding Love After 40
Most people think that by the time you reach 40 you should already be successful, have a house and kids and a husband or wife and maybe you did and maybe you do and maybe you thought you had it all but it didn’t work out. I’ve seen and heard of so many people and friends including myself go through divorce or a tough breakup even after many years of marriage. Divorce is the hardest thing you will ever go through but if the marriage/ relationship isn’t working and you aren’t able to rekindle then you have to be honest with yourself and do what needs to be done. Life is too short to live unhappily. I know my ex-wife and I had a terrible divorce but she is happy now and that is what matters in the end, happiness.
I admire my friends who are single and confident in whom they are as single women. Sure they would probably like to find love but that isn’t their focus because they are in my mind; strong, independent and confident women who can enjoy being single and embrace it. There are other reasons though why they are single and I am about to tell you the experiences of a close friend of mine.
I was feeling inspired to write about finding love
One Friday afternoon I called her up and said lets hang out and grab a beer and some wings so that is what we did. When we got to the pub some other friends of ours were already there so naturally we joined them. As I sat there I watched how everyone would interact with one another and listened to stories of their lives and I just took it all in. I was feeling inspired to write about finding love and what that looked like to the people that I know. I brought it up to Lori and she was eager and ready to talk about it with me. She is a successful, beautiful, confident woman who recently had her heart broken. The breakup for her came as a shock because in her mind everything was fine between them. They had fun together, they always had things to talk about and even when there wasn’t much to talk about the quietness was invited. She was good to him and he was good to her and she felt confident in their love until the day he ended it. At the time I watched her crumble and question everything about herself but I also watched her pick herself back up and dust it all off and march on.
She called me up after I told her I was inspired to write about finding love after forty. I told her I’ve found love, my forever love but I needed her take on what it is like for her.
This is how it began:
“I was driving around today thinking about your blog post about finding love after forty and one question we are always asked is why we’ve never been married or why we’ve never had kids? Not everyone HAS to have kids or HAS to get married. And because of that guys may think we have something wrong with us like would they rather I have been divorced?” – Lori
She continued….
“I had another thought….When I was working at Mosport this past summer, I had a father and son jump on to my golf cart. The dad commented on having the prettiest driver in the park and told his son ‘don’t trust the pretty girls they’ll only break your heart’. I immediately took offence to it and told the little boy ‘don’t believe that, this pretty girl has had her fair share of broken hearts too’. The next day I kept hearing that comment in my head and it made me angry, if that is what guys are teaching their kids they need to know it works both ways.”
I think all of this had been weighing on Lori and she didn’t even know it because she just kept on talking about her experiences….
“It seems that men are more worried about us wanting their money or their possessions when all we really want is their time and someone who will want us back. He could have all the money in the world and be boring as hell. If I don’t like someone’s company or conversation there isn’t enough money to keep me around. Love is about connection not ‘stuff’. Hell, I’m the first to admit that there are some crazy people out there that have no problem taking advantage of good men. They give the good women , a bad preconceived reputation but that’s not who I am. And to quote Miranda Lamberts Baggage Claim “Behind every woman scorned is a man who made her that way”.
It was therapeutic
As hard as it was to hear Lori talk about all of her experiences it also helped me get to know her even better and I am sure it was therapeutic for her too. We talked for hours about life and love and relationships and how we are all deserving of love and that could just mean loving yourself. How can you love anyone else if you don’t love yourself first? You can’t force love, you can’t buy love it’s something that comes when you are least expecting it and it hits you like a ton of bricks.
Certainly everyone has had different experiences and different thoughts on finding love and what they think. I would love to hear from you and how you feel about finding love after 40.
Thank you Lori Salter for the inspiration and I look forward to writing more with you.
