Mid-life-love

A story, an interview and an adventure.

Feb 14, 2024

In the flurry of frenzied romancing, this post is a little reminder that the greatest love of all is you. I’ve a little adventure for those who want to bring a bit of FUN into the fundamentals of your life, and if you’re single like me, I’ve also got tips from a dating expert. But this is about married love too…. Because all of it starts with you.

Midlife can be a turbulent time on the Love Rollercoaster. Divorces are devastating, midlife dating can be daunting and keeping the spark alive in a long marriage difficult. I know from my own life and the women I coach, that the love we thought would solve all our problems, was never the saviour it promised to be.

Love is a many-mangled emotion. For such a simple word, LOVE is an extraordinarily complex concept. It’s a verb, an ongoing action and yet we often talk about it as a noun: a thing we search for, attain, and then lose or keep.

Through my own rip-roaring ride on The Romance Rollercoaster, and listening to many of the women I have the privilege of coaching, love is rarely a noun, a thing lost or attained. It is an ever-changing challenge.

Many of my clients are painfully coming to the end of a marriage, or newly separated, trawling through divorce or post-divorce and holding their breath for what’s next (in terror or trepidation). Many are married, some happily, some frustratingly, and some wondering how to emerge from domestic drudgery and family-forming functioning to reconnect and reignite a new sense of purpose and passion.

As we are bombarded by the love language of Hallmark and commercialism around Valentine’s Day it can be be daunting to digest where you are on the love adventure.

So on this Valentines Day, as a single woman in her 50’s, divorced from a man but not from the idea of embracing a nurturing, nourishing, FUN new love, I sought the advice of a Dating & Relationship Expert. But first, a little story of love.

Your love story.

How you talk about your love history has a huge impact on your love future. The words you use, the memories you magnify, the narrative you relate has a profound impact on how much you get the write the next chapters of your love life, or your marriage.

Here’s the story of love I could tell.

I married a gay man. Not intentionally, obviously, but still, not displaying the best judge of character.

All that hope, all that future planning, pulled asunder by lies and deception. With hindsight of course, there were many red flags (and no, I don’t mean his dance moves). But you’re in love, you’re in the throws of building a family and it’s hard to line up all the facts and see them clearly when your wiping baby goo off your face and praying for two hours of straight sleep.

We got engaged, married, bought a house and got pregnant within a year. I got caught up in his whirlwind, not realising it was a tornado. Over the next five years I had seven pregnancies resulting in three glorious girls, and then four days after my last daughter was born my mum had a catastrophic stroke needing 24 care for the next 5 years. So, you know, there wasn’t a lot of time for navel gazing and aligning my flags in a pretty row so I could assess which had a red hue.

It’s not that he was a bad man per se, but he had his demons obviously. The part of the story that is interesting though is that I saw his demons, or at least their shadows.

And so the key for me is not to tell myself the story that I had bad judgement and all men are liars and I’ll never trust again (but a bottle of wine down I quite often did). That story keeps me stuck in that marriage forever, long after he’s signed the divorce papers and taken the leather armchair.

The real story, the one where I get to keep writing my next chapters, came about from asking what was it about me that pretended the flags weren’t there? What love did I deem so desperate for that I danced with his demons, rather than protected myself from them?

I had bought into the version of himself he had sold me. As he walked out the door that night, closing the front door on the life I had carefully constructed, listening to the sound of his car diminish down the road, I sunk to the kitchen floor and in all honesty, it wasn’t him that I wailed for. It was the life we had both promised each other without doing any work on ourselves. It was being left to manage three small children alone, while he went off to live his best life.

What I didn’t know then, is that my best life can never be with someone else’s demons. My best life was when I learned to dance with my own. (Although I’m still holding out for Keanu Reeves).

I couldn’t change him or who he is or what he did, but I could work on why I ignored so many flags, what was it I was really afraid of, and how to make sure I’m not that woman again.

So the story isn’t that I had a disastrous marriage. My story is that I am always learning and evolving and my judge of character might have taken a knocking, but but my own character didn’t. When I widen the lens on my love history (something that Is so important to do in any moment where we latch onto a version for grim life and let that version veer us in the next direction) I can see that I was treated well by all of my boyfriends bar one (again, red flags-a-flying) and am still friends or in touch with most of them.

We can internalise someone else’s demonic treatment of us, which is why the real story of love is that you are the love of your life, single, married, poly-anything or not.

Finding the one

We think of love as an output but it’s all within. It begins within and comes from within. But my generation of women (and all those before us) grew up in the dark shadow of the Fairy Tale Fiasco…. stories of women needing to be rescued, the knight in shining armour (was that metal a metaphor for emotional armour?), where the goal for a women was to find a man to be completed. Women may have been from Venus and men from Mars but the story was very much that we spun around their planet. They were the sun and we were the satellite.

The real story of love is that it’s no-one’s job to complete you. You must always do that yourself. Then they come along, maybe The One, maybe Another One, maybe more, and they compliment you. They bring you joy and love and laughter, you share purpose and passion and even pots and pans, but they do not make you who you are. As every divorced person knows, no matter how devastating (or liberating) it is, you remain breathing. You may have thought they held you together, and yes the pain can threaten to unstick you, but your relationship with yourself is the glue that keeps you together or sticks you back together. You are The One.

Author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson writes, “The only real dating advice is self-improvement. The best way to meet an incredible person is to become an incredible person.”

This goes for marriage too. Every women I have worked with who starts to invest back into herself, starts to reconnect and shine from responding to her internal needs and desires rather than constantly reacting to external demands and expectations - be that after kids have left home, be that in the midst of the chaos of family life - has found her relationship improves.

So the Fairy Tale is over. The story of your love is one of self-love, perspective and learning.

Finding love with others

That redundant Fairy Tale Fiasco puts too much pressure on passion and romance and it makes us half instead of whole. The end of a relationship is not a failure. Staying in one that slowly sucks your soul is. That doesn’t mean to negate the pain. If someone has changed you, shaped you, ignited you and inspired you and then it is over, it will hurt. But it’s not a failure. If you have loved well and been loved, that’s a success. And in this extended midlife it’s not a failure that as we all evolve, the one that complimented one part of our life, may not be the one to compliment another.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It takes work (what’s new, says you?). As I navigate single midlife myself, I spent time reconnecting to myself, developing a loving, nurturing relationship with myself, so that I know now that red flags are there to alert me that I need to pay attention, not colour co-ordinate to reach for feeling complete. If the colour of their flags don’t compliment my hue - my loving, learning, life-loving hue - then that is where I look, not at myself wondering what’s wrong with me. I then spent some time figuring out who I was as a single sexual woman, knowing I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for a serious relationship. Now I’ve evolved again, and feel readier to rumble on the romance train.

So here I hand over to the experts… Genevieve Gresset is a Dating Consultant for individuals, companies and was a consultant at Channel 4’s Married at First Sight. She runs couples retreats and retreats for singles trying to figure out the rules of the Hunger Games dating scene.

I asked her what are the self-limiting beliefs we often have that hold us back, and what is the top tip for finding - or reigniting - love. This is her advice:

Love is a force, weaving through our lives, mingling with each breath from the moment we are cradled in our mother’s arms. Adding colour to our courage, light to our landscape, a way of being without doing, it has many tentacles. It comes from us loving parents, loving children, loving partners, loving friends, loving dogs, loving cats, loving the sea, the views, the rapture of nature and the rupture of waves, the smell of someone’s skin and the unexpected sound of laughter.

The power of your happiness is in your own hands. You complete you so that love can compliment your life all around you in so many ways and through so many sources.

Happy Valentine’s Day - to being The One in your own magnificent midllife. I’d love to hear your thoughts so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)

Mid-life-love

A story, an interview and an adventure.

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