The challenges those growing older face

The saying is that the eligible pool of life partners gets smaller and smaller as you get older. This is not only absolutely true but it also applies to finding friends your own age. As you get older you discover that the number of younger people gets higher and the number of older people, more your own age, gets lower and lower.

When you’re single you begin to discover that a higher chance of feeling lonely comes on as you get older. There are people around you but you soon realise that they are far too young to understand you, or you them.

Those your own age have either passed away or moved on with their lives with their spouses, grandchildren or their careers. Or, sadly, you live on the other side of the world from them. As you look at the crowd of faces around you, maybe out of despair, it begins to dawn on you that most of the people are beginning their lives with their children or are hustling in meetings for their careers.

And there you are standing around watching the world go by, hoping to find a face you can relate to or to run into someone your own age and with whom you can have a meaningful discussion about what’s happening to you and them.

The level of disparity between the older generation, that might be you (and let’s say that you’re in your early 60s) and those around you (let’s say their ages range from their mid-teens and right up to the early 40s) is so wide that you might as well be living in different universes. A lot of them know nothing about the 70s, 80s or even 90s which, to them, are the olden days.

Even though you know what their life is like, because it’s happening right before your eyes, they’re focussed on the now and everything you tell them about what life was like when you were younger is totally over their heads.

You can imagine how difficult, or almost impossible, it is to build a friendship, much less even start one, on the basis of such a vast difference. Even if you do strike up a conversation, it goes nowhere fast because of the lack of understanding and awareness on their side...maybe even on yours.

At this juncture, older people begin to realise where they went wrong when they were younger. Moving and leaving are all natural progressions in life and we do it for a number of reasons. Work and family are the main ones. Some of them might be intended, some a mistake and others are just out of your control. But in spite of all this, some decisions we made were just plain stupid.

As you get older you realise that leaving a place should not mean the end. That moving from a place should not mean the end either. You’ll also find out later in life that not paying attention to something, or someone, could be a problem later on and, quite possibly, the end.

As you get older, you dwell on things from your past more often. And it’s not on everything from your past. It’s often only on one significant moment that keeps re-emerging. It happens especially if that moment, or time, could have defined who or what you are today. But you’re not because of your laxness or oversight.

But over time you sometimes forget about it because other things take over but then something happens and the memory is triggered again. The alarming thing is that with each trigger the loss feels more intense. It could be something to do with a career that went awry because of a decision you didn’t have a say in or it could be not making sure you maintained a friendship which you can’t now rectify because the person you’re looking for cannot be found, for a number of reasons.

Loneliness is a terrible feeling. You can be around people but still be alone. You might have all the money you need but to have someone to talk to who is of equal age and with similar experiences and backgrounds is much more important.