zoobyshoe said:
What I'm saying, I think, is that the older you get the more careful you get, despite yourself, and you acquire all sorts of instinctive avoidance behaviors that prevent you from jumping into things the way you will when you are younger. So, at the same time you are becoming less and less attractive physically and have fewer and fewer prospects, you are also, paradoxically, more picky about what you'll put up with.
I think "old people" are capable of being much more reckless than young people when it comes to romance.
Most single people in their 40's/50's are divorcees. The odds of meeting an emotionally healthy divorcee in their 40's/50's are pretty slim, so "careful" and "dating" are words that can't exist within the same context.
And while you're technically correct about older people being more picky, they're just more picky about
which emotional disorders they find desirable in a partner.
For example, a woman that gets defensive about answering sensitive questions asked by her furniture is kind of quaint and exotic. And while that whole cleaning the kitchen floor with a toothbrush thing is strange, at least she has really clean floors - plus, what's a toothbrush, really, but just an extra small scrub brush.
And while I can handle a woman that suffers from arachibutyrophobia, I just can't tolerate a woman that suffers from barophobia. I usually find a woman suffering from coprastasophobia to be preferable to a woman suffering from coprophobia. And, unfortunately, I can't tolerate a woman that suffers from either aphenphosmphobia or apotemnophobia.
And, while I can't remember the technical name for it, but whatever emotional disorder causes a woman to tack artificial vines to every damn window and to fill her house with artificial plants is unacceptable, as well - that's just completely incompatible with the phobia I developed about artificial plants during that traumatic cemetery episode.
But if she's an alcoholic or does drugs? Forget the whole break-up spiel, or even the fade out technique - I'm changing my phone number, e-mail, and changing the house numbers on the front of my house and then I'm dying my hair and buying new glasses.
