Love is a magic that can happen at all ages. Here’s what it’s like after 50 and after menopause.
Separating and then catching yourself wanting again , deciding to spend some time away from new relationships and then discovering that you have not considered that meeting, consciously deciding for a single life and then simply falling in love again, even if the candles of the 50 have been blown out for a while .
There are many reasons why you can look in the mirror and see a mature woman but struggling with some heart disease , of those you thought were long gone. Yet you can fall in love again and every time it can be different and beautiful, even if it wasn’t planned .
Here’s how it happened to me again.
How I “removed the dust” and found myself
My friend Francesca is more than a friend. We have lived together all the most important moments of our lives, from the first day of school – now almost 50 years ago – to the first love , from the bad nights to be recovered, up to weddings, separations, laughter and the darkest moments. with tears in her eyes but with the certainty of having a shoulder that would dry them. She is the only person who, when we call each other, can understand my state of mind from the “hello between” I tell her as soon as I hear her answer on the other end of the phone.
And so she was the first to realize that that business dinner had turned out to be much more memorable than I would have expected. We had spoken just 24 hours before and I had spent a good 20 minutes complaining about that invitation, an appointment to which I would have preferred not to be present, both for the fact that now the apex of my lust is sofa and cover, both because of my sincere and total hatred of these formal contexts full of elegant and smiling couples, cloying perfumes and dazzling costume jewelery.
Oh well, I admit it. Perhaps there is some envy of something that I have never had: my partner was anything but smiling and elegant … I made the mistake of falling in love with a man who was very informal and attentive to etiquette. On the other hand, she attracted me incredibly, she had a body that whispered to me every time to approach me and the only thing that really worked between us was sex . So when is the magic over – which sooner or later ends for everyone, but! – has brought with him too with a bunch of hysterias (mine), total silences (his) and that feeling of failure that I suppose belongs to both.
Today this recent past of mine no longer matters. It dissolved in a moment, like an air bubble bursting on the surface of the water. ” Suddenly, I saw my end on your face “, sang Battisti describing the end of a love. I’ve been humming it for about three months. Thinking of that “mine” as the old me. The one I was becoming with my beliefs that it was too late to fall in love again.
In love at 50. And now? What’s now?
Needless to say: exactly three months ago, the morning after that dinner, at a quarter past 7 on a Friday in March, I called Francesca. She replied out of breath thinking that something bad had happened .
- Glory!
- Hello Fra
- Good heavens, are you okay?
- Yes… ah, yes sorry about the time but I wanted to tell you something before I go to the office
- …
- Then I went to that dinner last night
- Gloria … don’t tell me you’ve seen Buzzy (which stands for “buzzurro”, the delicate epithet with which he calls my ex)?
- Well no… just imagine. Eh nothing, I just wanted to tell you that I was there … in short, that I’m fine and that … I wanted to ask you if when you leave you want to come to me for an aperitif
- Gloria… sure, all right?
- Yes Frace.
- At seven I’m with you. And I order the pizzas which I know is a long thing.
She understood it on the fly: so much so that when I went to open the door she showed up with two steaming cartons and an iced bottle of Lambrusco spumante rosé (the perfect wine for pizza) and a smile on her face: “You ‘I said you were only getting old inside your head, my love! ”
How did my love at first sight at 56 really go: chronicle of an evening
We sat down, we looked at each other, she smiled. We opened the sparkling wine, we cheered on the friendship and laughed at me the same question we used to ask ourselves as teenagers when we knew about the beginning of a new flirt : “And how is it, is it cool?”
I told her how I arrived at dinner with a boredom that not even the styling was on me … greetings, pleasantries, and then they had placed me at the table notwith my roommates, but with those from the other department that I didn’t even know by sight. So I had already planned to leave soon after the boss’s speech and in any case as soon as possible. It was me, with 3 other people at a table set for eight. An epic sadness. I sat next to a girl so as to have emptiness in front of me and not be forced to look at anyone. At one point two other people arrive at our table and sit down, he facing me and she next to him. They take off their masks and we look at each other, me and him. Her gaze woke me from a moment of cosmic emptiness, as if for a moment I realized I was sitting there at that table. And perhaps it was also seen, because he greeted me as one greets someone who has just got out of bed: “Good evening!”. To me. Only to me. “Good evening, – I replied, moving my gaze on her and trying to guess the type of relationship they had – I’m marketing”, “I’m Marco, nice to meet you. She is Roberta, another logistics colleague ”. Oh well, the summary is that we started looking at each other and then talking to each other and I didn’t listen to a single word of the boss’s speech because I was trying to focus my thoughts that made the swing between a “who knows what it really is” and a “you are no longer a girl”, referring to myself and tomy amatory potential now reduced to a minimum by dryness , prolonged abstinence after separation and resignation.
Between one course and another we tried to find – by deduction – the key to our lives, to find out if there were barriers or a clear path between us. Then he invited me to have coffee outside in the garden and brought out feelings of well-being that I no longer remembered since I went out in the evening.
- Yes, oh well … but then what?
Francesca had eaten half of her mushrooms and white sausage and I still had nothing.
- Then nothing, France. Then we said goodbye with the elbow and we each went to his house. But it was nice.
- You’re all stupid … but not even a word about “after” last night?
- France … I’m 56 and …
- And what? What do you mean? I’m 56 too and I don’t even think about letting something like this escape me, if it happens to me. He too is no longer twenty … so what? What do we do: do we declare ourselves “closed for bankruptcy”?
As always he was right, but I would find out a few days later.
Love after 50, oh yes!
We saw each other again at work, he came looking for me and it was a great revenge that I took on myself, on the nonsense I had concocted to escape the fear of being alone and ending it like this. We had lunch together for the first time on a Wednesday, almost a week before dinner. It was very embarrassing but at the same time a great relief: someone still liked mewho even came looking for me. Then again on Friday, I called him with an apology and we met under his office for a coffee after lunch. Then that Saturday afternoon, I was with Francesca around shoe shops, and my phone rang. It was he who invited me to join him for an aperitif in the center. I was about to tell him I was busy, because France and I had planned to go to the cinema, but with one elbow on my arm and the other hand in a paddle, waving as if slicing the air, he had authorized me to give her the hole reach Marco.
In the end, I don’t even know how it went. But that evening the aperitif became a dinner and dinner an after dinner and the after dinner became a walk-in-the-house and then the milky humidity of mid-April enveloped us in a kind of dense fog that hid us from the world. And he kissed me that it was almost morning, while he was passing the vehicle cleaning the streets.
So I found myself at the beginning of a story, exactly as it might have been at thirty. I understood that love does not change its modalities , its ritual and its sensations. We have been dating Marco for a few weeks and we make love , with a bit of effort due to some pain and the bloody dryness that came with the end of the cycle. I have already talked about it with my gynecologist who has always told me that menopause is not a disease and we have studied a suitable approach.
And it was the best thing I’ve done for myself in the last few years. I don’t know how it will go on with Marco. For the moment everything is new and beautiful and I am experiencing it as a big surprise. I don’t want to have prejudices anymore because they were the ones that held me back. Love after 50 is possible and how. And I’m sure that with the help of my trusted specialist it can be even more beautiful and satisfying.
