"Embracing Love in Full Bloom: Unfiltered Adventures of Midlife Dating"
and the 5 things you need to be doing to avoid disaster.
Can someone please cue the theme to The Love Boat :0 This was taken on my recent birthday weekend!
A quick reminder that my LeoSZN sale on my courses and consults is nearly over. Head to my previous post to find out more.
So where to start….
Once upon a time I used to blog about dating all the time. Perhaps you remember?
Mostly it was about the train wreck that was my dating life in my 30’s; a string of tongue in cheek self deprecating accounts of man children, narcissists, ghosting, mummy issues, daddy issues and well, the list goes on!
I was proud of wearing my heart on my sleeve, proud that I would do “anything for love”
I recounted my misadventures and regaled the eager reader with my subsequent brave healing journey.
I miss the woman that embodied that level of hopefulness and naivety.
I miss her a-lot, but I am no longer her.
Whilst I most definitely do not take responsibility for the harmful and hurtful behaviour of others. (And I acknowledge that even the most together and healthy human can be duped and misled.)
It is in fact pretty hard to be led astray when you are committed to yourself.
If you are first dedicated to yourself and your life it will be very difficult, no matter how enticing, for someone to encourage you to abandon yourself.
And abandon myself I did, left right and centre for the off chance of being loved, or even just liked. I did this in my intimate relationships but also female friendships ever eager to feel that much essential feeling of human belonging.
As Aunty Bréne will tell us all, first we need to belong to ourselves.
So I found myself in my mid - approaching late- 40’s SINGLE
Now I don’t know what the sound of the shrieking internal fertility clock feels like, but I imagine it’s a little like the feeling that I felt (and believed) that time was running out to meet someone.
That there was a timeline bearing down on me and an alarm would go off, maybe a screen would come crashing down and a light would flash on my head announcing the fact that I was done.
Done!
Too old!
Too fat!
Too grey!
Definitely no longer sexually desirable or sensual or I don’t even know what I thought would happen… Maybe that my vagina would shrivel up all together?
I mean it sounds ridiculous right but isn’t this what we’re told in all the direct and indirect ways that our culture treats older women?
You might recognise these stories also?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Then one final relationship lovingly (brutally bluntly) showed me all the fears, pressures and expectations that I was projecting onto my relationships in this age.
THIS IS MY LAST CHANCE IT HAS TO WORK!! (Imagine this shouted from the top of the grand canyon for effect! I mean no pressure mate!)
I believed so wholeheartedly that that was my FINAL chance to be loved; to find someone that thought I was attractive and interesting and might even be blind or desperate enough to want to have sex with me. Note here the focus is not about ME finding someone I thought was all these things!
So of course my greatest fears came true.
Because people ARE going to think you’re not attractive or not like your grey hair, or not be into you.
This is actually going to happen! (and it did)
And it won’t have ANYTHING to do with you.
And you will have to confront your beliefs about all the ways you’re not enough.
And still love yourself.
(And I did and it was fucking brutal)
Because you are more than your hair colour or the size of your jeans or the number of candles on your birthday cake. Your birthday is not an expiry date on being worthy of being loved.
And lets remember here that there are many many ways to be loved.
Your ability to love and be loved doesn’t ever have an expiry date.
I know I won’t be alone in these feelings.
The body augmentation industries of botox and fillers and boob and butt jobs are based on these thoughts of not-enough-ness being believed. (you do you boo and also this is a thing)
These stories and beliefs will lie lurking in the dark unacknowledged parts of our psyche waiting for their moment to run the show, unless we shine a light on those shadowy parts of ourselves.
Fast forward to the present day.
I don’t think anyone escaped the dark and windy slippery dip that was 2020- 2023 completely unscathed. So I will assume your understanding and skip to say that a pandemic, two house moves, a relationship ending and a fifo job later I found myself Really single and ready to get on with my life.
But first some therapy!
One of the most kind and revolutionary things my therapist said to me in our initial sessions was that so much of life's big achievements, like relationships, were often down to circumstance, chance and luck. I cannot tell you how much of a relief it was to hear this from someone in authority!
Many of us have accepted as truth so many spiritual tropes from self help books and gurus that “we can manifest anything we want” so much so that it can feel like it must be our fault when we don’t magic every damn last thing into our lives ….including our very own life size ken doll.
It was a relief to feel that there wasn’t anything “less” happening in my life. That the logistics of friendship circles and job acquaintances and so many other things that I have absolutely no control over are involved in creating the ‘meet cute’ that I was hoping for.
AND
And that there were likely to be some very understandable beliefs rooted in survival behaviour keeping me safe and keeping me out of range of new healthy relationships.
This isn’t the article for exploring all that happened here. Therapy in some form is something I recommend most days to most clients. Understanding ourselves and why we make the choices we do and clearing patterns and beliefs that no longer serve us; healing and restoring, is one of the most potent and kind ways we can care for ourselves and those we love.
Point in case we weren’t even looking at romantic relationship dynamics and it wasn’t even something that I had declared a desire for in our sessions, but two weeks after a very potent EMDR session I was on Hinge and two weeks after that I was on a first date that would change my life.
Now let me just say that rushing off to find an EMDR practitioner to magically sort your relationship wounding isn’t something I’m advocating.
Correlation isn’t Causation.
AND I do recommend therapy in any form that serves you and I think EMDR is an amazing modality.
Subtly and nuance is my jam friends :)
Following is my list of things that I think benefits dating at any age but especially if you’re single in midlife.
But before I get there I also want to share that 8 short weeks into this new relationship my life was tipped on its head.
You can read about it here
Had this happened 8 weeks earlier I most definitely would not have decided to open up to online dating.
I could no longer prioritise the relationship to the same degree. I had my finances, health and overall life to focus on. This is not a particularly easy thing to do. Especially when a lovely man has just landed in your life. It would have been easy to avoid the hard conversation this requires.
Welcome friends to the drop off point for self abandonment island.
It’s important to understand that without key elements of my life being healthy (ish) that there would be no relationship. HARD conversations were had and I had to model again and again what choosing myself looked like. I write about how and why we need to do this in this article here.
However hard this was, this was the foundation for the year that has followed as it was visible to us both that I was self reliant AND open to support, something that so many women struggle with. Over coping and Hyper-independence is something that is endemic in our culture.
That is a topic for a whole ‘nother article, so without further preamble here is my list.
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