Q:
I’m a vibrant 52 year old confident successful widow. I know I hit the genetic lottery because most of my friends and colleagues guess I’m 40. Low and behold I’ve gone and fallen in love with a man who is 31. He excites me in ways I haven’t felt since my husband died. He doesn’t care about our age difference and we’ve recently been talking about marriage. I sometimes worry that if our friends knew my age they would think differently of me. Would the younger generation deem me a predator? What happens in 20 years when I’m 72 and he’s 51? I’ve already lost one great love. I don’t want to lose another.
A:
You know what winning is? A confident successful woman finding love and vibrancy again after the pain of profound loss. All the parts of you are reawakening like a spring flower opening to the world. And it must feel so damn good! Before you know it, you’ll be in the routine of morning walks, grocery lists, Netflix & chill, life building, and the overall contentment phase that naturally follows where you are now. Do yourself a favor and just fucking bask in this glorious stage of the newness of love!
If you were a 52 year old cis-male dating a 31 year old cis-female, not an eyebrow would raise. Hell, my parents are 17 years apart. You’re not harming anyone, you’re not doing anything illegal, and you’re both grown ass adults who can make decisions for yourselves.
Love is love. Hopefully by now, all generations—younger or not—appreciate that. People can’t deny the beautiful energy of love when they see it in action. It’s magical and inspirational and the world needs a whole lot more of it.
If you were engaging in some sort of manipulative power dynamic, then perhaps you could check yourself on the predator box. But I’m not hearing anything like that from you in your message. What I’m hearing is that you’re deeply in love. And anyone who has ever loved deeply knows we must wrangle with the simple fact that the deeper we love, the deeper the pain when we lose that love.
For as you’ve learned my Queen, all love is tragic. Someone always dies in the end. It doesn’t mean our love dies. Au contraire: love is what makes us immortal.
You fear riding this wave again. You fear losing, maybe this time not by physical death but the death of no longer being your beloved’s object of desire in 20 years. Maybe that will happen. But maybe it won’t. A whole host of things could happen tomorrow that none of us know. We can’t control or predict the future. Maybe a plane goes down or a bus goes flying off a highway. Maybe there’s another horrible ravaging pandemic. Maybe one of you has a heart attack during sex.
How lucky you would be to get two years of living in this love—not to mention 20 or more?!
I always like to ask myself, what if I focused on the good what ifs instead of the bad what ifs?
What if you have the greatest day of your life together tomorrow? What if the two of you cook the best meal you’ve ever had next weekend? What if you have the most glorious, tender, intimate sex you’ve ever experienced? What if you discover your new favorite place on Earth during your next vacation? What if, while on that vacation, you are sitting in a cafe next to an author who captures just a moment of your love, and it inspires the next great novel? What if, just by the two of you being you, you help another couple heal and grow in their love? What if … what if … what if!
When you focus on the potentiality of loss, you’re cheating yourself out of this beautiful gift you’ve been given. Cherish it. Appreciate it. Don’t take it for granted. Not for one second!
I know you’ve been to the darkest, most painful parts of your world. You’ve lost your soulmate once before, the one you were supposed to have forever with, the one you sat perched high atop a cliff with, savoring the magnificent view of the world in each other’s arms. When he died, you were flung over the edge, clinging to the side of that cliff as rocks crumbled down upon you from above, suffocating you with dust, desperate and dangling, fighting just to stay alive. But you made it, my Queen. And you’ve proven to yourself that even if the worst thing that could possibly happen, happens—you’re capable of climbing back up to the top of that vista again.
Isn’t the view breathtaking?