There’s been love in my life recently. Oh, not in my own life, but for two dear friends who have recently reconnected with men from their past and who are now enjoying good old-fashioned, grand, fairy-tale-level romances. One just celebrated her second wedding anniversary, the other is still at the swoon stage.
I love these women and I am ecstatic for them — it’s hard not to be. The stories, reconnecting after decades, are that good, the men are that good and, best of all, these are women in their 60s, an age when we women of a certain age are constantly told that men are no longer interested in us (yeah, I’m looking at you, Yann Moix),
Well, wrong.
As I celebrate their newfound romantic joy, there’s a part of me that is aware of the dangers of love stories, so beautifully explored in Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love With Anyone — part-memoir, part exploration of the love stories we let dictate our ideas of what love “looks like.”
Fetishizing love stories
The Modern Love essayist had been in love with love stories since she was young, especially her parents’ love story. When they divorced after three decades of marriage, she — a bit shell-shocked — delved into the way we tend to fetishize love stories and how that sets us up for pain. What she wanted was a wider perspective and more honest portrayals of love stories, stories that recognize that loving relationships are as varied and beautifully complicated as we humans are, that there isn’t a “right” way to do love.
Was I — a romantic for sure and, after two divorces, also a realist — fetishizing my friends’ love stories? Both were happy as they were — divorcees who sometimes had partners, and sometimes didn’t, sometimes dated and sometimes didn’t, one who clearly was happiest partnered and one who has been happy “as is.”
And then that rascal game-changer appeared — love. Complete with beautiful “what are the chances?” love stories.
A different love script
As I thought more about it, though, these are not the love stories Catron wanted to challenge. Catron, now in her 30s and happily partnered, was following the meet, date, fall in love, live together, marry, buy a house, have kids and live happily ever after script of young love — until relatively recently, the only script that seemed to be available. That is slowly changing.
My friends and I, at midlife, are not following that script; we lived it and rejected it after X-number of years. We have entirely different expectations of love now, and we are open to different ways of having it. While Catron admits that for most of her life she viewed love as “something that happened to me,” that isn’t how those of us as midlife see it. What we want (if we want partners, that is, and most of us do) is someone with whom we can give and share love.
Which is exactly what she eventually came to realize:
Maybe we would stop thinking about love as something that happens to us, and start thinking about it as something we get to offer another person, thoughtfully and with generosity.
An unexpected gift
And that is indeed the beauty of my friends’ love stories. What a gift to offer love later in life, when we are no longer distracted by raising children and building careers and all the expectations that come along with that, when we actually have time to give love thoughtfully and with generosity. And, I would add, with gratitude.
At midlife, we may have wanted love but we didn’t necessarily expect it.
That’s how Love, Again: The Wisdom of Unexpected Romance author Eve Pell described it to me when she stumbled upon love at age 71. Older people are better prepared for love, she said, because of life experiences, a sense of our mortality, more confidence, greater acceptance and — perhaps most important — gratitude.
Are there problems with love stories? Probably — if you’re attaching expectations to those love stories. At midlife? Probably not. They’re just delightfully old-fashioned grand, fairy-tale-level — and unexpected — romances. And we are ever so grateful for them.
Want to know how to individualize your partnership? (Of course you do!) Read The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (Seal Press). You can support your local indie bookstore or order it on Amazon.
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I have reconnected with a friend I have know for nearly 50 years. Some things in my life need to change first, but I’ll let you know how it works out.