Not What I Expected - Middle Aged Dating
Warning: this is one of those rare “Loren’s personal life” posts, so if you just want to think of me as a tech/music guy, you should skip this one. You’ve been warned.
So.
I recent-ish-ly became full-blown single (preceded by about a year of “it’s complicated”). For the first time in 10 years.
In two weeks I’ll be 41.
I’ve been very career focussed for a long time now, so dealing squarely with personal relationship issues has been in the back seat, and frankly I’ve forgotten what it feels like. Recently I’ve started to try out dating again, and the last time I did that in earnest, well, the years started with “19”.
I’m not going to talk too much about this, other than to take note in this one post. Also, I’m not going to kiss and tell, and I’m not going to post barfy broken-hearted teenage diary material here either.
What I thought I might do, however, is comment on what has surprised me about the experience so far.
The first, and most surprising thing to me, was the intensity. I’ve been used to gradually less and less emotional intensity over the years, but with this I suddenly felt like I was in my early 20s again. It’s like an acid bath. I wrote lyric for that:
What I thought was all scar tissue, is actually an open nerve.
(Yes, I am quoting myself. I know.)
Perhaps it’s just my specific circumstances, but I was shocked that the emotional context around this stuff, at least for me, is just as intense as it ever was. Maybe that’s one of the attractions of long term relationships - people need to step away from the raw chaos. In any case, it has my attention now.
On the other hand, it may just people possible that I’m slightly less stupid than I used to be. So far I managed to not make a mistake that I’m pretty sure I would have made when I was younger: prolonging a painful situation without much promise. If something looks like it isn’t working, just stop doing it. I really want to try and not apply magical thinking to any situation in which I find myself.
The second thing I noticed was the relationship between awareness and experience. One of the things that experience can deliver for you is awareness. I now know when my head is messed up. I now know when there’s some real potential, and when there’s probably not.
None of this awareness changes the way I feel one damn bit. I can be perfectly aware that something may not happen, but I still want it to happen just as badly as before. It’s just that now I know what’s happening.
Third: emotions are physical. The best thing I can do with out of control emotions is to let them happen, and try and help them along via my body, not my mind. It’s harder to feel moody after hitting the gym for an hour. Oxygen does wonders. As for just letting them happen - I guess that’s a kind of judo. If I’m feeling a little miserable I’ll try to intensify the emotion (privately) instead of fighting it. The idea is to let it do it’s thing and have it pass through my system, rather than have it hang around by fighting it.
Last one - and I have yet to, er, fully test this yet, but I love models for stuff, so this is fun to think about:
The Dating Sequence Model
This is astoundingly geeky, but you can think of the first few dates as a conversion funnel. At every step there’s “traffic drop-off”. But the drop-off is for different reasons at different phases.
Date 1: Screener. Hardly counts as a date, just there to assess dating potential. High drop-off.
Date 2: Getting to Know You. You actually start to get a since of the person with which you’re dealing. Possible for some disappointment, as reality can intrude.
Date 3: Up or Down. People are starting to actually envision whether they could date the other party.
Between Date 3 and Date 4: The Decision. The people decide whether a relationship is going to happen with the other party. Big drop-off point.
Date 4+: You are “dating”. How seriously is of course something that varies, but the habit has been established.
