Skip to main content

Age and Timing

Was at a happy hour recently with some folks I know and few that I don't. The age range of the group ranged from mid 20s to mid 60s. Singles, couples, empty-nesters, gray divorcees and grand parents were included in the mix. How people make surface level chatter seems to be informed by who they consider to be part of their identity. Work is a big part of it and then its who is at home or absent from there. Finally what they do in their personal time and who they do it with. One of the men in the group had been hit with the trifecta of divorce, pandemic and having his only kid leave to college - all within the span of three years. He comes out the the other side of it, the world is making the most of "normalcy" while he is dealing with a confounding emptiness and the rotating cast of women he has first dates with it. 

The friends as he mentions them in the passing are also divorced guys with older kids - college and beyond. In our ad-hoc group that evening, he was one of kind in a life stage a bit too novel for the rest of the crowd to find relatable. As you get older, the pool of people available to consider a relationship shrinks exponentially. Both sides have become too set in their ways to make any realistic and lasting change. If one side has been single for a lot longer than the other, they would not have much patience for dealing with the shock and awe of becoming suddenly single at an age people are mentally preparing to enjoy the coasting stage of life. On the other hand if both are in the same boat, they may more sympathy of each other but not necessarily the resources to help.

As we parted ways, I could not help thinking how big a role age and time played in helping a person in his situation bounce back. If he had been a decade younger or the event had occurred a decade ago, chances are he would be back in the saddle by this time. Age and timing were not on his side and that made it the hard situation it was. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more