From the Grand Nudge:
Based on some of my most recent posts you might think that Valentine’s Day would be a “Bah Humbug” holiday for me. While I do get a little annoyed at the Hallmarkian quality of it throughout the first two months of the New Year, I’m surprisingly a bit of a romantic. That is why I advocate love in community.
Some people specifically point out to us here at Women for Living in Community that we seem a bit exclusionary. What about the men? Of course men can live in community; I’ve never assumed that was up for debate. However, I also know that women need to take an active role in their long term planning. Statistically, we do live longer.
However, for that same reason women sometimes find themselves wanting not only friendship and support in a living situation but also romantic companionship as they age. Whether we’re widowed or divorced we’re still humans. We still have needs, both physical and emotional.
But love in community can present its own challenges. Living with other people in a shared housing situation, for instance, can have its own stressors but add a married or dating couple into the mix and other household members can feel ganged up on if a disagreement erupts. What might be worse is being the audience when a couple has a fight of their own.
Do you want to know the crazy part? When I searched “tips for dating” and added qualifiers such as Baby Boomer or Older Adult, most of what I got back were online dating sites. Apparently there is a big need for companionship but not a lot of resources to tell us how to do it, especially if we’ve been out of the game for a while. If I take a page out of the Millennial’s playbook it appears that we are supposed to text each other with incomplete sentences that replace letters with numbers, but I still don’t know exactly how they meet each other.
So, where was I? Oh yeah, love in community. Well, I’m not going to give you tips and advice. As much as I’d like to think I am qualified to talk about every subject known to man, I’m no dating guru. What I am going to say is “Go for it!” Life’s too short to be overly cautious!
Happy Valentine’s Day from the Grand Nudge!
