Having sex is easy. A limited number of moving parts and ports of entry.
Love on the other hand…lots more moving parts. And the more time we have on this planet, the greater number of those parts.
When we first leapt into the crazy world of love I would guess most of us started out on an even playing field. We were young; didn’t have much; didn’t know much about life and even less about love. For the most part our approach to life and love was fresh and trusting. I remember my list of desirable attributes for my life partner was dark hair, blue eyes, and a nice guy. I got that. Ah, the simplicity and naivety of youth.
In the beginning I think the loving is easy; everything else is hard
– family, mortgages, making our way through our financial and professional lives. But through it all…we could hold on to each other and know that together we could get through anything. We believed the songs and the movies with the happy endings.
Then as the years click by, love gets harder too – whether it is staying together when EVERYTHING is different than it was at the start of the relationship or venturing out to find new love. Unfortunately, our hearts know nothing of whatever wisdom we may have accumulated along the way. When it comes to matters of the heart, practice doesn’t mean we’re going to get better at love.
Since I’ve been out in the dating world for a while now at this certain age, I’ve learned the endeavor is both easier and harder than what I remember it being when I was younger. Easier because many complications and distractions of our youth have fallen away – kids are grown and gone, work is winding down. We have time to devote to a relationship. We know who we are and what we want. (By the way, my list of desirable qualities in my next potential partner has grown considerably.) And harder because we’ve had a lifetime to get set in our ways, and decades to gather all sorts of people and things, which may require some shuffling to make room for a new person.
All things considered I believe that no matter how many moving parts there are, and how many are working, or not, there’s always room for love in a heart of any age.