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Many people feel their life is over at anything from thirty-five to sixty-five years. Why? Because their life partner has left them. Nobody has told them about love the second time around. No one has told them that love is like the measles - all the worse when it comes later in life.
Falling in love is no different at fifteen than it is at seventy-five years. There are still the same old emotions whirring around inside us. One's heart still feels so large that it might burst.
To quote Lynda Barry, "If it is your time love will track you down like a cruise missile. If you say `No! I don't want it right now.' That's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke."
A lament I frequently hear from divorced men through www.LeCouple.com.au free online singles dating: `Who would want a forty-year-old bloke with a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old living with me?' `That's easy, a divorced woman with a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old'. I reply, as though I had been asked a riddle.
Single women with children often add to their profile: "No single men without children"; because, "he telephones at the last minute and expects me to drop everything to go out that night".
"He can't comprehend the difficulties of finding a baby sitter at short notice - the commitment to one's children and their activities; and that when you have young children; you are on call twenty-four hours a day".
Therefore a divorced or separated guy with a couple of kids who understands about being on call and having his children every second weekend will understand your family complication. There are plenty of single fathers in the same boat.
Another fallacy that seems to affect women, in particular, is that once over forty they have 'had it'. Every time I hear of a single woman who has been told, `there is little hope of meeting a life partner once you are over forty', it makes me cross.
Your adult life began at twenty. At forty you have only lived twenty years; with modern medicine, you probably have at least another forty years to go. And you will not be on your own; there are many others in the same boat. Single men and single women with a problem, too often, think that they are the only ones. All the baby-boomers are over sixty years; that means a population explosion of sixty to seventy-year-olds - many of them single and seeking a life partner.
Falling in love the second time around is not very different from that heart stirring experience at fifteen. Those who threw caution to the wind in their teens will probably do it all over again at fifty years.
Julian Barnes wrote: People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions; the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
The more reserved single man likes to feel his way, allows love to creep up on him slowly. But although his may be a less spontaneous reaction, before he knows it, he is: head over heels; completely gone; seeing life through rose coloured glasses; a walking encyclopaedia on her virtues.
Madame de Stael wrote, `We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us'. And this happens (fortunately it is only a temporary state of affairs), to many people who have just been through the agonies of ending a relationship or marriage.
The more reserved a single person, the more amazing is his or her reaction to love, no different from when he or she was a teenager.
No man is an island. We all need love and affection and we also need to give. If you believe that life will be better it will. Cut short your mourning time to make way for your next dating experience. The longer you mourn, the harder it is to break the habit.
The key is to give out. My favourite saying to single men and single women on www.LeCouple.com.au free online singles dating: "If you seek a friend, be one." Forget your own misery and make an effort to reach out to others.
Nancy Mitford said, "To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease". It certainly will not take if you do not believe you are worthy or you are in a melancholy state.
Taking an interest in others takes your mind off your own loneliness and gives you a confidence that others are attracted to.
A friend of mine is very shy yet made an effort to speak to others at gatherings. I asked her, how come you start up conversations when you are so shy. She said, "I always assume that others are shyer than I am".
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: "Who so loves, believes the impossible. Everyone who is in love believes it is a miracle, and people are falling in love everyday - miracles happen every day."
When, a fellow who joins www.LeCouple.com.au (doubting whether he will ever be happy again), writes to say, "She is just what I have been looking for - and twice as pretty. We are going out again tomorrow night"; we know he has probably fallen in love the second time around.
Mignon McLaughlin describes it aptly in Spring Fever:"Love", she said, "seems to pump me full of vitamins. It makes me feel as if the sun were shining and my hat was right and my shoes were right and my frock was right and my stockings were right, and somebody had just left me ten thousand a yea"'.
If you are looking for marriage or just want to enjoy dating with a special person we recommend giving online free dating. So do the many thousands of singles who have met their partner through www.LeCouple.com.au free online singles dating.
Lydia Lambert manages worldwide free online singles dating site, www.LeCouple.com.au – free to register.
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