22. Pain: He didn't do it like her late husband did

Senior dating is just another facet of life. I keep talking about the reality of life, or the truth of life, which just means seeing things as they are, without adding our own story. The story is our analysis, interpretation, judgment and so on. And the story is always what causes us to hurt, whether in dating or in other aspects of life.

We’ve lived a number of years to get to this senior age, and even though we feel we’ve gotten wiser I’ve also noticed, as I’ve participated in countless workshops and spiritual meetings involving intimate sharing, that a mature age doesn’t mean we’re aware of reality. We’ve had a lot of years to be conditioned about the way life is “supposed” to be. And when we’re not clear we tend to add our stories to life instead of seeing it just as it is. Those stories cause us to hurt.

Here’s an example. Joe is a friend of mine, widowed. He has a companion I’ll call Darlene that he sometimes travels with, and they enjoy each other’s company. In fact, they have an excellent relationship nearly all the time. One time after they’d left the hotel they had stayed in Darlene seemed a bit cool toward him. There was no reason that he knew of so Joe, being a straightforward kind of guy, asked if something was wrong. At first Darlene was reluctant but finally began to share. She later admitted that what she was feeling wasn’t clear to her until she had to put it into words. It was a subtle expectation she’d had that wasn’t met.

He didn’t do what her husband had done

The issue was this. She’d been happily married for more than 30 years. Whenever she and her husband traveled, as they left the place where they stayed for the night he always stopped and kissed her and told her how much he enjoyed being with her. It was a kind of celebration ritual, something she looked forward to and took for granted.

Joe hadn’t kissed her when they left their hotel. He just packed the bags and they drove off. Immediately, Darlene said later, she wondered why. Didn’t he have a good time? Had she done something to irritate him? Wasn’t she a person he was glad to be traveling with? Why couldn’t he just take a moment to tell her that he liked being with her?

She realized, as they talked, that it hadn’t occurred to her that just because her late husband had always exited hotels with a kiss for her and kind words, that just didn’t happen to be what Joe thought about. It wasn’t that he was unkind or uncaring. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good time. It was simply that Joe wasn’t her late husband.

As a senior, years of conditioning can trip you up

Our thoughts and memories bring up conditioned responses to life. Like Pavlov’s dog, ring the food bell and the dog salivates. Leave a hotel (in this case) and get a kiss and nice words. I’m not demeaning us as being like dogs. It’s simply true that we’re conditioned animals.

As seniors we’ve lived enough years to have a lot of memories. Those can turn into expectations and if we’re not aware we don’t even notice them. But we don’t have to be vigilant all the time to make sure we’re not bringing our history and expectations into a new dating scene. All we have to do is notice how our body is feeling.

If we’re feeling tension or stress we know it. Whatever the feeling is, whether it’s anger or jealousy or any other feeling, it always registers some way in our bodies. There’s the tightness in the neck, the rolling of the gut, the sweaty palms, the furrowed brow… something.

That pain or discomfort in the body is a simple little signal that says, “Wake up! Your thinking is off track. You think something that IS, shouldn’t be that way. It should be your way instead.” Then you can ask yourself: Is that true? Can I really know it should be the way I think it should be?

When you answer that honestly you may find that the way it is, is just the way it is. How do you know it’s supposed to be raining? It is. How do you know he wasn’t supposed to kiss me when we left the hotel? He didn’t. That’s the way the universe is functioning right now. And the universe, or “what is”, always operates by its own light; it doesn’t ask for our opinion. Have you noticed?