Widowed at fifty eight, wanting company first and the rest much later
Posted as sunday_lists
- Looking for
- friendship, then perhaps more, in that order and no other
- Experience
- Thirty one years with one person, all of it entirely private.
- Around
- Brooklyn, New York
My husband died two years ago in March. We were together thirty one years and the dynamic between us was the quiet spine of the whole marriage. Nobody knew. It never had a name in our house. It was simply how we were.
I am fifty eight, in Brooklyn, and I have discovered that what I miss is not any particular activity. It is being known by someone who is paying attention.
I would like to start with friendship, and I want to be honest that I may stay there. Coffee, a walk, long conversations, the slow business of finding out whether you like somebody. If that becomes something with a shape to it, I would be glad. If it does not, I would still rather have a friend than nothing.
I am not fragile and I do not want to be handled carefully. I laugh a great deal, at unsuitable moments, and my daughters find me tiring. I am just not going to move quickly, and I am well past the age where I feel any need to explain that to anyone. I should probably add that I have never done any of this with a person I was not married to, so in one narrow and rather important sense I am a beginner with thirty one years of practice.
What I do not want: to be anyone's first experiment. To be told that what I had was not really a dynamic because we never used the vocabulary for it. Or to be asked, in the second message, what I look like now. I look fifty eight. That is the correct answer and it should not be a problem.