the slow plan

“You were just protected,” a friend of mine says over lunch on the weekend.

“Protected?”

“You were married young,” she says, touching the edges of her mouth with her napkin after she finishes a mouthful of chicken. “You never had to go through it.”

She’s right, I guess. Just as I emerged from university and onto the real-life dating scene, I was swept off the market by the man who would be my husband for 18 years.

I never really experienced the dating scene. From the time I was old enough to date until the time I met my husband (at 22), men sort of came out of the woodwork. I never agonized over them. Not really. Sure, I wondered if they liked me, and all that, but there was never any huge mystery about it. At that time of life, too, things are so busy – you’re heading off to university, then changing cities for work, then moving on somewhere else (or at least, I was) – that relationships came and went like the sun.

So, now, I am just having to experience what anyone who was single in her twenties and thirties did. Seated in the heart of my life – I have no plans to head off and live in Africa or anything just now – and happy with friends and work and my children, dating seems more like a project, an endeavour, than it ever did. It feels as important as trying to establish a career. My romantic life is the one hole in my existence. Everything else is grand. But you have so little control over it. You meet nice guys. You meet some weird ones. Some guys disappoint you. Some thrill you. And your mind does cartwheels all the time, trying to figure it all out.

I should add here that despite the fact that my marriage didn’t work out and I sometimes think I may have missed out on the best years to be single, I also am kinda glad that I didn’t have to endure it. I had a husband before I was old enough to worry that I might never. I never had to worry about whether he would commit. (My husband was the one to give me the marry-me-or-else ultimatum.) I had a domestic fantasy life before most of my peers.  I never had to go through all that angst about whether I would marry before my ovaries kicked the bucket. I had three wonderful children before I turned 31.

I should also add – to be fair – that getting married for me was a nice solution to the hurly-burly of life in one’s early twenties, when you worry about who you are, and what you should do with a career and where to live. I was at a particularly vulnerable time when I met my future husband. I had moved a lot. I really didn’t know who I was and what I wanted.

To become a wife – and then, quickly, a mother – was an identity fix.

I was talking to my friend over lunch on the weekend about the recent men in my life – Sir Likealot, in particular. As anyone who has been reading my recent posts knows, I met him about three weeks ago, and last week, we had a second date.

It was fun, but not a house burner. I realized I had spent a good deal of time projecting about him, and when he was there, seated across from me, I thought, well, hmmm, nice guy, but what was I so excited about?

It’s like another single friend of mine – with whom I went for a long walk on the weekend – who told me about some guy she had seen at the bus stop near her house for a few mornings. He was cute. He once said, “Hi.” She started fantasizing about him. And then, a few days later, she actually talked to him and got a “big gay vibe,” she explained. “I was so embarrassed,” she confessed to me. “Here was a guy, who had said ‘Hi’ to me once, and I was planning our whole life together.”

My new thought is that I do like Sir Likealot, and I think he likes me – we can talk immediately like old friends – but maybe this is one of those relationships that just has to start off as friends. It’s not like we talked into the wee hours and made out madly, deeply, passionately. We didn’t. We had dinner. At about 10pm – it was a work night – we both went our separate ways.

I wonder if midlife dating requires time to really get to know each other. At this stage, our lives are so complex – with kids, exes, work triumphs and failures, and a big ol’ fully developed personality. To figure out a romantic merger between two such entities needs an expert in deal-making. It’s more complex than deciding if General Electric can mesh with Royal Bank of Canada.

So, time, baby, time. That’s my new mantra. I hope to see Sir Likealot again. I think I will. And if it takes twenty dates or more for us to figure out if we even want to kiss, then why not?  In middle age, you may not have that much time ahead as you have behind you, but that should be even more reason to make sure that what you enter into will be happy and comfortable and right. It seems counter-intuitive in a way – if you don’t have as much time to love and live as you did in your twenties, why not be quick about it? Carpe diem and all that?

True, but I also don’t want to waste my time on something that isn’t going to make me happy. And I don’t want to get myself into a situation quickly – namely, a romantic one – that I then have to extricate myself from with a great deal of angst and upset and hurt to all involved.

If I am going to find a great love, I want it to unfold gently and slowly and beautifully, so that it dawns on me, like a revelation, and isn’t something I have to convince myself or someone else of.

I told my friend this, as we ate lunch.

“That sounds like a plan,” was all she said.

I guess she knows that in the great game called dating you have to have one.