Composing a Further Life

continuing love in Adulthood II is still to be explored, with changing meanings of
forever
and a willingness to learn and relearn the identity of the other. Forty years ago—a great many changes ago—I wrote these lines, the meaning of which is still emerging:
    We never promised we would stay the same
,
But only we would shape our change

From this now single clay
.

    Marriage has often been supported by the economic and political interests of families and clans, and often expressed in contractual form, both of which gave it more stability than a definition in terms of romance. Most cultures have some provision for the dissolution of marriage, although often, as in Orthodox Judaism and Islam, the initiative is limited to the man. Marriage was a late addition to the sacramental system as it developed in Christianity, filling out the symbolically satisfying number seven. It is sometimes said that divorce is so common in the United States that Americans have become serial polygamists. There is another joke that divorce has had to be developed as a cultural replacement for death, because so few marriages are sustainable for fifty years or more, particularly since, as other family ties and supports have weakened, the dependence of individuals on their spouses has increased.
    When my husband and I lived in the Philippines and Iran, I became aware of the additional stresses on expatriate households removed from familiar and familial support systems, but these challenges are part of a larger pattern discernible in America of isolated, vulnerable, and potentially brittle nuclear family units. Nowhere is the decay of the extended family and the increased dependence on the nuclear family more obvious than in the transitions of aging. Ironically, many couples make decisions about where to live after retirement, moving to places where the weather is warmer and their human ties are thinner, that put them into the same situation as couples assigned to foreign military bases or diplomatic posts.
    Establishing new relationships is more challenging. Men and women in their fifties and older who have lost a partner to death or divorce face the same problems in looking for new relationships that we all face in thinking about growing older, which is to say that we are burdened by assumptions we grew up with. The very word
dating
carries connotations of artificiality and manipulation that we are happy to have left behind as men and women have worked side by side and learned to deal with each other as individuals rather than as “dates” or possible “lays.” Those who have had long-term marriages have grown beyond the conventions under which we met our spouses, but the process has been long and complex, and many women are still constrained by marriages contracted half a century ago to conceal their intelligence, limit their ambitions, and accept second-class status, while men find themselves defending obsolete and burdensome ideals of manhood.
    Aging potentially brings men and women closer as hormonal influences ebb and both beauty and physical strength are compromised, but there is always the risk that any change can be regarded unconsciously as a form of infidelity: How could the handsome man I married betray me by going bald? How could the pretty girl I married betray me by putting on weight? On the singles market, men are often busy trying to replicate their dating ideals of decades past, and women trying to recover their more recent and less idealized domesticity.
    For me the associations of the word
dating
belong to the fifties, with sexual mores of seduction and defense, skirmishes about how far to go how fast, and both parties attempting to keep up an artificial front, a complex game to be consigned to the past. We now live in a culture in which friendship and collegiality are possible between men and women, women are expected to know their own minds, and sustainable friendships may seem more valuable than transient romance. Couples of all ages do find each other, but not necessarily through a reconstruction of long-forgotten patterns of dating.
    I have one friend who, when her marriage ended, began by exploring a dating site on the Internet. I met Ellen Hall more than a decade ago when I was invited to meet with doctoral candidates in education at the University of Colorado. She was still working on her dissertation but had already established and was running a preschool called the Boulder Journey School, partly inspired by