Midlife romance

It’s a complicated, er, proposition.

[I]

When you’re young, you tend to move in crowds of the equally young and eligible, at school, nightclubs, sporting events, church youth groups, malls. Nature and society both conspire to find you a partner. You may have to beat volunteers off with a stick.

But once past the age of reproduction, nature and society both lose interest in your love life. Even if you return to school, or keep up your snowboarding skills, most of the folks around you are ineligibly young. Odds have increased astronomically that anyone your age you meet in a bar is a confirmed alcoholic. Church may still provide a meeting place for believers, but there aren’t many organized services for those who list “spiritual not religious” in their online profiles.

Yes, there is always online dating. I know a couple of folks who found life partners that way, a couple who thought they had but were later disillusioned, quite a few who made good friends, and a roughly equal number who simply gave up, discouraged. It’s probably a good option for those who tend to fall in the middle of the bell curve. They will, naturally, have a larger pool of potential partners from which to draw.

The rest of us are left perplexed: how do you find someone whose eccentricities are sufficiently complementary?