"Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street," sang Taylor Swift right before I flipped the radio dial to another station. It's the only line of *any* of her songs that I like. Not that it relates to me and my life, but I appreciate a good simile when I hear it. If I were singing that song (or having that song sung about me), I would revise that line to: "Loving him is like driving an older, but well maintained, Volvo on a limited-access traffic-clogged toll road on a rain-soaked day." It's not catchy or poetic like the Maserati line, but such is my life. Twenty-five years from now, I imagine Taylor Swift's songs will be filled with similar turgid lyrics drawn from her middle-aged life.
Love -- the redux version -- is trickier in mid life. Not only do you have to go through the hard, often confusing work of finding someone with whom you might want to spend a big chunk of your future -- someone who "gets" you and won't bore or annoy the shit out of you over the long term -- but then you have the very complicated task of trying to weave together two lives already interwoven with the threads of children, making a living, and other responsibilities one accumulates as a middle-aged adult. All of these complications act as brakes on runaway love, and while that can be frustrating, it's probably a good thing.
Unlike falling in love in my 20s, second-time-around love at 49 is more cautious. It's like being a good driver who is tempted to go faster, but chooses to drive in the slower lane because it feels safer when you've got a kid or two in the Volvo with you. It'll take longer to get where I'm going, which is annoying, but that's the tradeoff -- feeling safely in control while enduring my own frequent irritating complaint, "Are we *there* yet?"
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