How Pathetic Is It To Be a Woman Long Past a Certain Age Who Doesn’t Have a Partner?

It’s been raining nonstop for the past couple of days, which means I haven’t been exercising.

Maybe that’s why I woke up at one this morning in a state of absolute panic.

Managed to sooth myself back to sleep, but it wasn’t easy, and this morning I’m still feeling dread congeal in the little hollow spaces just below my clavicles.

Where is this panic coming from?

There is one middlingly major Practical Issue I’ve put off dealing with for a couple of weeks, but you know. Two weeks is nothing.

I suppose I could drop dead at some point today. Maybe the panic is a premonition! But, again. I’m not and never have been what you could call deeply attached to being alive. One would hope that slipping out of the mortal coil would be as painless as wiggling out of a pair of stockings—careful not to snag them or make them run! But even if it isn’t, hey! I’ve done childbirth. Death couldn’t possibly hurt as much as that.

And Linda will take my cat.

The earth could fissure, and Nazis could issue forth from the underground on a slowly rising platform, dry ice hissing around them. You vill come mit us to the campZ!! they will intone. Honestly? I think that’s what I’m most frightened of.

###

Part of it, I suppose, is that when I’m in income-generation mode, I become very isolated. I mean, I do have interactions with the various people who live in my house and kindly shop clerks. I’m one of those people who’s very good at talking to strangers.

Ten years after migrating to New York, though, I don’t actually have a support system as such. Instead, I have marginal membership in a great many groups—“communities,” my politically progressive-minded pals would term them—and to a large extent, those groups don’t overlap.

There really is no one who shares my peculiar constellation of interests. There are people who share some of them, and so, when I’m with those people, those interests are what I’m all about. But after a while, I start to feel resentful: So many things have to stay suppressed because the people I’m with just aren’t that interested.

###

How pathetic is it to be a woman long past a certain age who doesn’t have a partner?

I go back and forth on that one.

On the one hand, the vast majority of the marriages and long-term relationships I observe seem completely dysfunctional to me in one or more important aspects. Shared experience over time creates a kind of matrix like the calcareous sediment that traps living corals. Excrescences include family, offspring, shared property ownership, social obligations etc. Those things are very gluey!

On the other hand, I have been privileged to witness a few partnerships that were just a joy to be around. Two people who synch so gloriously that the wonderful whole is bigger than the sum of its absolutely fabulous parts. My beloved pal MaryBeth’s marriage is like that. It’s a total gas to hang out with MaryBeth, to hang out with Kim, and to hang out with the two of them together.

I guess because I was brought up as part of a dysfunctional dyad—during those formative years, it was just me and my nutty mother!—dyads seem like the ideal social construct.

So, I’m forever searching for that other voice in my inner dialogue.

johnny9fingers advises me to project that need onto the Omega Point.

But it seems to me projecting anything onto the Omega Point is just one step away from accepting Jesus, Mohammad or any one of the Sky God’s other lineal descendants as My Personal Savior.

Which is not in the slightest appealing to me.

###

Oh, look at that! A window between rain storms. I better get out there and run.