Episode 9 Fifty Shades of WTF

Welcome back and this is Fifty Shades of WTF. Yes, that is actually the title, because if you’re over fifty, single, divorced, dating, thinking about dating, recovering from dating, or simply watching the whole dating world from a safe distance while wondering what the hell happened to people, you probably understand exactly where I’m coming from. Dating after fifty is a completely different bloody game. When I was younger, I thought dating was about finding love, getting married, building a life and growing old together. I thought I’d have that great love story where, at ninety, we’d still be smacking each other’s arse and giggling like teenagers. That was the plan. Apparently, somebody forgot to tell my two ex-husbands.So here I am, fifty, divorced twice and back in the dating world, looking around and occasionally thinking, “What the actual fuck happened?” Because dating at this age isn’t just about finding someone attractive and deciding whether you fancy going for a drink. We’ve accumulated decades of life, experiences, relationships, heartbreak, lessons, scars, bad decisions, good decisions and, in some cases, enough emotional baggage to require its own bloody baggage carousel. And yet here we are, downloading dating apps and trying to decide whether a photograph of a man holding a fish tells us anything useful about his personality.But underneath all the humour, there’s something I really want to investigate. I’m not here to give dating advice, and I’m certainly not here to tell you how to have a successful relationship. After two divorces, I think we can agree that would be slightly ambitious. What I want to do is look at ourselves and ask some uncomfortable questions about why we chose the people we chose and why we stayed where we stayed. We tend to ask ourselves, “Why did I put up with that? Why didn’t I leave sooner? Why wasn’t I stronger?” But I’ve started wondering if we’re asking the wrong questions. Maybe the better question is, “Why did I believe I needed to stay?” And perhaps the biggest question of all is, “Why did I believe that was all I deserved?”That’s where the investigation gets interesting, because suddenly we aren’t just talking about our exes anymore. We’re talking about ourselves, our childhoods, our fathers, our mothers, our experiences, our wounds and the things we learned about love long before we ever went on our first date. That is where The Great Investigation comes in. Not as a way of blaming our parents or our exes, and certainly not as an excuse for the choices we’ve made, but as an invitation to become curious about ourselves. What were we looking for? What were we trying to prove? What did we believe love was supposed to feel like? What did we believe we had to do to be chosen? And what did we believe about ourselves?Because maybe dating after fifty isn’t just about finding someone new. Maybe it’s about finally understanding ourselves well enough to stop repeating what we’ve already lived through. It’s about figuring out the difference between chemistry and chaos, being loved and being needed, partnership and motherhood, compromise and disappearing. And if we’re going to step back into the dating world at fifty, we might as well have a bloody good laugh while we’re investigating it.So welcome to Fifty Shades of WTF — dating again after fifty, finding ourselves somewhere between the train wrecks, the red flags, the right swipes and whatever the hell comes next.