If you think back to your twenties and thirstiest you realize that love felt like a high-stakes audition, didn’t it? You had to perform at your best and show that you were the best version of yourself. You were doing an act, performing success or God knows what, and it did put a lot of pressure on you and made you feel exhausted. But it was normal, because you were chasing a feeling, a status, a future that maybe felt out of your reach.
But once you get past the age of sixty, things change. The “chase” lost its importance because not only your knees may start aching more often, but also your brain will calm down. By this point, you have had enough experience to know that all the things that stressed you out in the past weren’t worth it. You have seen the best and the worst times in your life; you maybe got divorced, saw your children grow up, lost parents and friends. Well, the list goes on. You’ve gained a set of “silent lessons” that cannot be acquired during youth.
Now, love becomes a state rather than an action. What you need isn’t somebody to admire or be admired by, because that phase is long gone. All that is left now is to find somebody who gets it and aligns with you in every possible way.
This is something that many authors, including Jorge Bucay, emphasize about this stage of life, when we start shedding off our masks. When one turns 60, these masks no longer become pretentious; they become burdensome. One does not need to hold their breath in order to seem slimmer or cover their past experiences in order to make themselves look good.
This also changes everything about what one is looking for in a partner.
1. Companionship that doesn’t cling
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