Are You Ready For A Thing Called Love?

Since I have sometimes mused within these posts about dating in my 50's, it is interesting ( at least to me and perhaps to you) to talk now about love. Why? Because as much as I hoped I might fall in love again someday, hoped I might meet someone who tickled my fancy, moved me to my bones, and with whom I wanted to share this time in my life, I thought that if it happened, it would be a long time from now. And it is not a long time from now. It is now. I have fallen in love.

I have dated a lot, learning a lot in the process while I have grown used to being single, considering meeting men a job I have needed to undertake in order to understand who and what I was looking for, understand how I am with men and what kind of men bring out the best in me, what kind of men I am attracted to and not. I have had wonderful times and wretched times, met men who sound like I have made them up (the sex-obsessed Zen priest? Really?) and men I wished liked me more.

And now I have met and fallen in love with a wonderful man, a man with whom I am at the beginning stages of knowing. Falling in love in my 50's is so different from falling in love in my 20's. We both know so much more, have histories which are longer and more complicated, know ourselves better than either of us could have all those years ago. One of the things I know, and which he and I have acknowledged, is that this wonderful experience is now, that it might last and it might not. That the potential for pain is not reason to avoid succumbing to the joy. That we have rich lives independent of one another and that building a relationship is complicated, scary, time-consuming, distracting, delicious, and oh so worth it.

I wasn't ready a year or two or ten ago. But I am ready for this thing called love now. Sing it, Bonnie.