One of the biggest myths I hear in dating is that there’s an age where it’s somehow “too late” to find love.
I can tell you, from personal experience, that this simply isn’t true.
I started dating again in my mid-fifties, and in my late fifties I met my life partner. If someone had told me years earlier that the healthiest, happiest relationship of my life was still ahead of me, I probably wouldn’t have believed them.
Looking back, I had so many quiet assumptions about what my fifties were supposed to look like. Being deeply in love with someone new wasn’t on the list.
The reality is that many people become single later in life. Some are newly divorced after marriages that ended in their forties or fifties. Others are widowed. Some never married at all...,
The Montreal story
One of the most compelling examples I ever heard came from a woman I bumped into in Montreal who was a friend of my sister’s and we started chatting on the street.
She had been married four times. She had also experienced two long-term relationships that ended tragically with the loss of her partners. And yet she met her latest husband at seventy-eight years old.
When I met her, she was in her mid-eighties, happily married, travelling the world with him, laughing, enjoying life.
At my father's funeral, years later, I shared with her how that meeting had given me so much hope, since I was then still single and feeling burnt out and discouraged about ever meeting anyone. I told her, that I felt if she could meet 3 loves of her life after her initial divorce, that I could at least probably meet 1 person.
She laughed and I introduced her to my partner, and she then told me something extraordinary: that her friend’s mother had just met her "newest" boyfriend in her nursing home, and she is ninety-six.
No expiry date
Bottom line..., — there is absolutely no age limit on connection, companionship, romance, attraction, love, or even sex (most of us have heard of the stats on the soaring STI rates in long term care and retirement homes).
Sometimes love simply arrives later — when we know ourselves better, and we’re clearer about what matters.
If you’re dating over 40, 50, 60, or beyond, don’t write yourself off.
Your story may not be over yet.