Sixty eight, still driving, and looking for daytime company
Posted as still_swimming
- Looking for
- somebody near my own age for company and something slower
- Experience
- Thirty years, both sides, and a long quiet stretch lately.
- Around
- the South Bay, Los Angeles
My wife and I were in this together for twenty six years. She died four years ago and I did nothing at all for three of them, and then last fall I realized I had turned into a man who talks to the dog.
Sixty eight, the South Bay, switch, thirty years in. Still driving, still swimming most mornings, still perfectly capable of a long day. What I want has changed shape. I used to want intensity. Now I want company: somebody to spend a Wednesday afternoon with, somebody who knows this part of me without a lengthy explanation, and a dynamic that is mostly attention and small rituals rather than anything strenuous.
I go both ways and always have. These last few years I have leaned toward following, which I suspect has more to do with tiredness than desire, and I am curious whether it changes with the right person.
I would prefer somebody within fifteen years of my own age. Not out of any principle about who is allowed to want whom. It is that I would like to talk about the same decades without having to explain the references.
I am not looking to be looked after and I am not looking to look after anybody in a medical sense. I have done that and I know what it costs. What I want is a companion, with this in it, for however many good years either of us has left.