I was told by my ex-lover recently that 'I'm looking for love in all the wrong places.' Maybe it's so, maybe he knows the reason why... but when confronted with statement like that, where is the right place to find love?
I am not in a position to meet 'love' through the office as I work for myself, and I can tell you now, that looking at the dads at school or my kid's hockey or basketball club ain't a possibility. I found my lover on a website, so if I found him there and he's telling me that I'm looking for love in the wrong place, then I'm not going to go there again... I've gone out with a girlfriend a few times to a pub, but with all the eye gazing to suss out all the 'likely candidates', there really hasn't been a person who I would say looks worth even having a chat to. I have been to friends' birthday parties, hoping that maybe they may have a friend who would be interesting enough to chat to, but you just get looked up and down like you might be an easy piece of meat being a 'single friend.' I have friends who relentlessly look for men on dating sites hoping to find the one, but all they do is cheapen their self-esteem by going on too many dates and feeling horrible about who they are just to find 'the one.' So, as I ask 'where is the right place?'
What I find incredibly frustrating is that I am at 'the age,' 'time of my life,' however you want to package it, that anyone who has been in a divorce or long term relationship that has failed, tend to have a 'selfish' attitude to making their life about 'them.' And that's fine, because you are doing the same thing too... you want all the things that you didn't have in your marriage, you want to raise your kids the way you want to and not be dominated by an ideology of another because they have different children or different circumstances. But no one is willing to compromise to allow a relationship just to get its feet off the ground.
Even if you do find a single, never been married guy that has possibilities, you question, why has this man never been married at this age? Has he never grown up? Is he way too selfish? Does he now realise that he wants to have kids or that he's missing out? What is his agenda? And that's the thing... when you're approaching 40, most single men are wanting to have their own kids, want a mother-figure as their own mothers are too old or dead to look after them or do they like what you're all about for themselves, but don't know what they can provide for you?
There is no equality... If all you are looking for is some companionship, some regular sex and just to feel alive with some romance without any wedding ring, extra washing to do or responsibilities of 'belonging' to each other, then your chances of finding that 'one' person who doesn't want you to drive their kids to soccer practice, making brownies for the school fete or pick them up from the airport because they are too cheap to order a cab, is very difficult.
You do become very cynical. You are concerned that any potential candidate has an agenda that's different to yours. You understand that the game rules can change at some point of any relationship, and that's OK, because love, admiration, connection and commonality come in, and you may actually want to be more involved in your lover's life, or vice versa, and it may be mutual, but to get anything off the ground, it seems virtually impossible, essentially, because after being divorced or in a long term relationship and 'settling' in a relationship that wasn't right for you, means that your senses are overloaded with trying to find someone who is 'right' and not just 'he will do.'
In the last 4 years of being a 'single mum,' I have had more married men hit on me than single men, I have had more older men (15+ years older than me) hit on me than men my own age, I've even had men 10+ years younger than me hit on me because they think that I'm an awesome mum and they just want me to be their 'mother figure' and do all the fun things that I do with my boys with them. But for some reason, I'm not good enough for guys in their late 30s/early-mid 40s... probably because they are on their own mid-life crisis of being a boy again. It almost makes you want to go to the other side...
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