What if I never meet the love of my life?
How to be brave about love in midlife.
“You’re getting close to being left on the shelf,” I was once told by an older woman.
I was 30.
I was also Deputy Director of UNICEF Ireland, just back from Iraq, waiting for the keys of my own apartment bought off the plans and really enjoying my life. I mean, I was living my dream. I had a great social life, a fun love / sex life (not always the same ;-)), and most of all, I had agency.
I laughed her off… because frankly, I was enjoying the shelf.
“It has a great view,” I told her.
But her comment left a little smudge in my brain. Because it implied I wasn’t “normal.”
That enjoying my life of agency and ambition was somehow not the done thing, despite it being the thing that so many women had fought for me to have. Women fought to give me and my generation the luxury of choice. And it is a luxury. We take it for granted now but it wasn’t always women’s to have. Until relatively recently enough, women had no choice over who they married. No choice to leave a marriage. No choice but to suppress ambition, creativity, curiosity in order to fulfil their specific role.
I was revelling in the chance and choices open to me. But there was still the expectation that I would find The One and Settle Down. I was reared on the Disney diet and relentless RomCom messaging that I, as a woman, needed to be saved. A man must complete me. Despite the choices, it was still challenging to redefine the deeply grooved narrative that marriage and kids is the only option.
(I wasn’t even being that radical - I just wanted to make sure I had my life sorted and meet someone who had their life sorted and together we would love and laugh and share and thrive as individuals and strive as a couple to compliment each other’s lives as much as possible. I didn’t see that in my parent’s marriage - or any marriage - growing up. I saw my mum - and many women - loose huge swathes of themselves in family care and possibly juggling that with work.)
I loved my life, and I didn’t appreciate how much I would weep for that agency in the years to come, when five years later I did get off that shelf-with-a-view and followed the prescribed pathway.
Me being me, I didn’t just get off the self - I plunged off the shelf. It all happened so quick and so dramatically I was swept off the shelf in a tsunami of Disney drama, engaged, married and pregnant in less than a year.
For those of you who don’t know… that tsunami was a red flag. After a frenetic five years of family-forming (7 pregnancies, 3 babies) followed by another five years of sandwich years care raising those babies and caring for my mum following a stroke, I discovered my knight in shining armour was a mirage. He was in fact gay and I, having never been a damsel in distress before, was now in a lot of fucking distress having given up my career to support his and raise the girls and now was left to get on with it alone while he went off to find his knight in shining lycra.
Ten years on I am perched on a new branch of life….not a shelf, but a platform from which I have reclaimed my agency, practising choice and ready for the chance to redefine what my next relationship might be.
And as I look around at the midlife mating rituals I see that greater sense of “let’s figure this out”, let’s not take an off-the-rack approach to love, but a “what do I need / want now?” attitude.
I’ve watched my friends redefine or end their marriages. I’ve supported clients through divorce (and redefining marriages).
All of this takes bravery.
In this last year I’ve had a client end her marriage at 59, another fight for her marriage through hell and back. I’ve coached women starting out and over again, finding the delight in themselves reflected back in a new partner’s eyes. My pal is on the third love of her life… just happens to be the same man. They have reinvested and redefined what their relationship is at different times…that’s bravery. A successful marriage or relationship is one where both people thrive… and in order to allow that individual growth, you have to risk that in order to thrive for one person, the relationship no longer serves.
I have dated, explored who my single sexual self was, and redefined my old marriage, learning to be brave in how our family evolves. He is now remarried and a couple of weeks ago I sat in a restaurant with our three children and his husband to celebrate my middle girl’s 18th. That didn’t happen overnight. But it has now happened and I am proud. Proud of who I have fought to regain and become these last ten years.
Being brave in love used to be about knights in shining armour.
Now bravery in love is about being bold in defining what you want at every stage. And women now have that choice - within or without a marriage / relationship.
What if I never meet the love of my life because it’s me? Because learning to see and hear and support me was the goal of completion, complimented by a variety of loves?
What if I’ve loved and been loved well in so many ways (and I really have, gay husband, notwithstanding) and there are more good loves ahead - men, friends, dogs, cats, adventures?
What if saving ourselves is the new Disney dream? And then loving from that space is the new rom com message?
Women were trained to believe we needed saving.
That a woman needed to be saved by a man to be a legitimate socially acceptable human. But that is changing. Not because we don’t want to find a long and nourishing person to love us; but because isn’t that love better when it is about want, not need?
More and more women are staying single
More and more are not remarrying after divorce.
Not because men are bad, but because the care load can still be too heavy. Because although we had choice, we often didn’t get the chance to thrive as much as we’d hoped.
Saving ourselves means we are with people because we want them, not need them.
I’m a happy cat lady. Calling me a crazy cat lady is a compliment, not a slur. I’m also a happy dog lady. A happy mum lady. A happy friend lady. A happy-have-every-other-weekend-to-myself lady. I’m a happy-figuring-out-what-a-midlife-relationship-might-look-like lady. I’m a love-men-enjoy-sex-need-my-own-space lady.
I don’t need saved by a man. I had to save myself and will continue to save myself to become whatever I can become.
Yes, I’d also like someone to laugh with, and cry on, bounce banter and dive deep with, and have great sex, and languishing afternoons with a book.
But if I do, it won’t be because he’s completing me.
That’s my job.
But I hope he will compliment my life for as long as he does (and yes, I’m still waiting for Keanu Reeves to knock on the door).
The marriages I see that maybe need a new goal now the kids have left. Or a different pace now it’s the woman’s time to have some space and figure out what she wants to do with it. Marriages that still work but need some work to work better.
And that’s all bravery.
As the generations of women learning what choice might mean, we don’t have to wait to be saved. We can figure out how to save ourselves, whatever that takes.
Now that women don’t need men as much as they had to, men need to learn how to be wanted, instead of needed. We may not need a man to pay the bills but we want a man to be a partner, to inspire and elevate us, to care for us and excite us: to encourage our thriving and support our surviving.
They are not competing with other men; they are competing with women’s sense of self.
I don’t know what lies ahead for me. I have a new puppy… a wonderful new decade of love, no doubt. I might meet the man of my (occasional) dreams next week in Greece. Or I may flitter and flirt through a single with lovers status for a few more years. I may even have my best orgasm yet in my 60’s.
Who the fuck knows?
But I’m trying to be brave enough to find out. What about you?
And talking of bravery…. fancy a little adventure? I’m SO EXCITED to announce my first overseas coaching experience. Soul & Spice is not a retreat. It’s for women brave enough to move forward. This is a pause with purpose.
It’s designed to help you:
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✦ Reconnect with your sixth sense – your inner voice, your spark
✦ Reclaim your sense of self through powerful group coaching
Are you ready for a little life adventure?
All the details are here.
As always, my paid subscribers can email me at alana@alanakirk.com for an exercise on how to get braver in certain areas of life.
And if you fancy one powerful hour with me to figure out your next brave steps details of my Breakthrough Empower Hour are here. (10% discount for my paid subscribers).
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