Fifty nine, widowed, and I never told her any of this
Posted as never_said_it
- Looking for
- patience with a man who is starting from nothing at fifty nine
- Experience
- None at all. Forty years of knowing and not one conversation about it.
- Around
- the Black Country, Birmingham
I was married for thirty one years to a woman I loved and I never told her this about me. Not once, not sideways, not late at night. She died four years ago. I have thought about that omission more than is probably good for me and I have concluded it was cowardice rather than kindness.
Retired toolmaker, fifty nine, the Black Country, on my own in the house I have lived in since the eighties.
So, no experience. None. I have known what I am since I was a young man and I have done absolutely nothing about it, and I am aware that a man of my age writing that sounds either very sad or made up. It is neither. It is just what happened.
What I would like is a dominant woman prepared to be patient with somebody starting this late. It does not need to be dramatic. I would be content with rules, with being useful, and with being told plainly when I have got something wrong, which is a thing nobody has done for me in four years and which I have missed more than the rest of it.
I do not want to be anybody's good deed. I do not want to talk about my wife with a stranger, now or later. And I would rather meet somewhere ordinary in the daytime, because I have never done anything like this in my life and I would like the first attempt at it to be small.