A week later, it’s another coffee date. The conversation flows freely. He proves to be as adept at listening as he is at talking. We talk travel, music, movies, the breakdown of our marriages, our mutual love of a good fountain pen. We laugh. A lot. He asks me out for dinner. I accept. I meet him at the Italian restaurant he’s chosen, and I tell him I can’t stay too long as I have to fly overseas early the next morning. Three hours later, I’m wondering where the time has gone. He drives me home. He kisses me. It’s chaste, but nice. I call him bold. He laughs.
I message him the next day from Melbourne and tell him I’m thinking about him. He replies to say he’s at dinner with friends and won’t stop talking about me. We plan our next date. He says he wants to take me to Oppenheimer. I figure anyone willing to sit through a three-hour movie he’s already seen, just so I can see it, might quite like me.
We agree to be kind to each other. We go out for dinner countless times, sharing dishes and stimulating conversation. We say we want to take things slowly, for fear of screwing things up, then totally fail to do that. We delete our dating profiles by mutual agreement. And, perhaps much more quickly than either of us anticipated, we fall in love.
The real surprise for me is not the falling in love itself, but how it feels: it’s every bit as exciting in my 50s as it was in my 20s. I can’t help the idiotic grin when I talk about him. I want to make him happy. I want my family and friends to adore him as much as I do. We tell each other we’re smitten. I worry about my myriad surgical scars; he offers to buy vitamin E oil to rub into them. I write him love notes, tell him his eyes are like the ocean. He says he was searching for a unicorn, a mythical creature, and he’s found her. We talk about showing each other our favourite places in the world.
But love, at any age, is not easy. It requires raw vulnerability, and the fear of being hurt does not lessen with time. When you’re younger, you can make each other your priority; however, we each have children, dependants, so our priorities are by necessity different - we can never be each other’s number one. We carry scars from past relationships. But we also have learned the value of communication, of consideration, of appreciation and the determination to make each and every day count. We also know that love is less about feelings and more about choices and actions, and we want to make them positive ones.
Oh, and it turns out Mr Right was right under my nose. Alan and I live just a 10-minute drive from each other, and we work just 200 metres apart. Yet we can’t imagine that we would have met any other way than online. I said I was looking for my missing jigsaw piece when I apprehensively signed up to those dating apps - it turns out my jigsaw is now complete, and it’s a thing of beauty. 2023 has turned out to be a pretty good year after all.
Read more in Lorna Riley’s Dating, Again series:
Part One: How to navigate the apps as a 50-something.
Part Two: Advice and lessons learned from using dating apps.
