I met my pal and writing chum Tammie this morning, and as we settled into our semi-monthly routine of ordering some coffees, unbundling our gear at our table at the restaurant, and chatting a few about the recent events in our lives, our talk touched on current life and relationships, and my mind revisited a question that has bounced around in my head in recent weeks.

It’s a question that has been in my head because life just rolled through another spring this year, full of blooms and blossoms, and with each spring over the last several decades, I have told myself “Maybe this year.”

Maybe this year I will meet someone.

Maybe this year I will meet someone I can build a future with.

Because spring is the season of new beginnings and fresh starts, the shifting of climate from cold to warm, and of the inevitable parade of young lovers out and about, locking eyes and holding hands.

Maybe this year.

But “Maybe this year” has become a different notion as I’ve gotten older, and in the last few years, that seasonal hint of hope has come to bring me some reluctancy as well.

Because a question has joined it that also announces itself, a caveat to romance later in life.

What should a love relationship look like when you are older?

I still cling to visions I nourished as a teenager about what I think an ideal romance would look and feel like, and while some of those visions’ tenets remain viable, some are broadly outdated. Two people in midlife understand real life love much differently than their teenage counterparts. Children have (or have not) been raised. Careers have been built. Wounds have been received- and given. Disappointments have accrued. The hardness of life has been met, often resulting in sobering lessons learned, defenses built, and escape outlets forged. And often those teenage visions of love have morphed into surrogates for what is possible in reality- because love is meant to occur in real life, between two real people. Two mostly healthy people at that.

But I am not quite sure where I am on the healthy scale.

My love life history, the brief of it there is, is largely littered with poor personal choices, adamant attachments to uninterested or uncommitted parties (decades at a time), extensive loyalty through longing, and inevitably, deep disappointments. My trust reservoir has never been very full, but it certainly drained to near empty in the last decade.

I still wonder about and wish and hope for one great relationship in the upcoming years of my later life, but that question has given me pause in the last few years.

What would such a relationship now look like, and is it worth wanting?

Because we are not children any more. And maybe the domain of that kind of early, passionate love is for the young, and I just missed it mostly, like many other significant passages in life. Needs are different. Wishes and hopes have changed. Even activities in the daily regimen are departures from the pursuits of youth. The older person has different life goals than the twenty-year old.

I do subscribe to a theme I find common in the thoughts of others my age on the topic.

At this point in life, what I know I need is easy and gentle- not drama. Because I know that the later years are rife with special problems of their own, and to be with someone who is shut down to walking into them together is, to me, the same as me living in my current situation- being left to deal with the struggles of life all on my own.

A potential situation which, in evaluation, brings me back to the question.

What does not change throughout a person’s life- any person, I believe- is a need for love, and connection, and support, and relevance.

And I am sure for many, those needs do not require a romantic relationship to be fulfilled. But we still grow in intimacy, through the rubbing of our lives and thoughts and interests and pursuits with others.

But having a loved one- who has seen you at your best and your worst, and at your weakest and your strongest, and who knows the depths of you and most of your why’s and why not’s- hold your hand and talk with you about the events of your days, even at sixty, cannot be all bad.