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No, you're fine....
I know what you mean. In my age bracket, only a few men are clean cut. Most of them have beards and they don't realize it makes them look 10 years older. A beard is a turnoff for me so I just flip by those photos.
I am a paying member of Zoosk, only 11 dollars a month, but most of the men I see on there are really scruffy. If they are halfway decent looking they never respond to my messages. Yes, there are a lot of scammers on there too. I am also on eHarmony. They call it scientific matching but none of the men they match me to are even close to my interests. In almost a year there has only been one man I messaged. He was a nice man, and attractive, but we did not have the same interests. I am also a paying member of Spiritual Singles, only 12 dollars a month. I communicate with a few men on there but they are just friends since they don't live close to where I live.
I'm not inherently turned off by beards, and I think most men look better with some facial hair, but definitely not when it resembles a rats nest.
I guess we women all have different tastes.
That is a hard hit at evolution.
Probably not a Baha'i this time. It was only an accident of fate that my late husband was a Baha'i.
Yes, that is quite different from my situation. I met my late husband through my sister and mother who knew him becaue he was in theor Bahai community. Apparently he had been looking to get married since the Baha'i Faith recommends marriage although it is not required. At that time, he lived in S California and I lived in N California, so he wrote me some letters and I recall talking on the phone. I thought he was crazy, since I was in no way looking to get married. I was undergoing psychiatric treatment at that time as was he, so we could relate to each other and we had some similar family history and emotional problems, like anxiety and depression. I had not dated before that, nor had he, we were both virgins. Suffice to say, the honeymoon was very interesting. For the first year or so we kept the sex therapist in business, but it worked out in the end. About 15 years later we started having disagreements related to our careers so that caused a rift in the romance, but we stayed together as friends and companions. We were both Baha'is and we both loved cats so that held us together.Nothing whirlwind about our connection. After we met we met for tea and then had a few dates. I'd been separated from my 'childhood' marriage for about five years but it had been only months for her. We were both doing therapy when we met and connected quite a bit around that. But we were both cautious. I suggested we do couples therapy to feel out how realistic we were being with ourselves. That helped. Early on she announced she thought a year was enough time to decide if we really wanted to get together. Funnily enough we ended up setting the date a year to the day we met. I often tell the story about how I got railroaded into it.
I cannot even recall thinking about his age until a week after we got married. I think I put that out of my mind, because I did not want anything to spoil my plans. Even later I did not think about the age difference and worry about it because I had to only live in the present and not think of the future in order to survive my very difficult life. If I ever thought about it momentarily, I hoped I would die before him, and I convinced myself that was possible since he was in good health until the last few years.
I am also an introvert, and after the first 15 years or marriage, I started doing more and more on my own. We used to go on annual vacations together but that stopped after the first 20 years. I did my own thing and he did his own thing, both in the house but with different interests. What we shared in common was the Baha'i Faith and the cats, but he was interested in world news and politics and I wasn't so for the last 10 years I spent all my free time on different religious forums while he was watching TV.
I never planned to go to the GriefShare group, but after about six months it became obvious to me that it was a good idea, since the idea of getting remarried had fizzled out by then. I needed a place to go where I could connect to other people who were kind and empathetic and going through similar experiences. It was kind of awkward since it was Bible-based and at a church and everyone was a Christian. I am not a Christian so I did not want to talk about my religious beliefs out of respect for the group members. We share many beliefs about God and Jesus in common, but Baha'is do not believe in the Christian doctrines, like Jesus is the only way and only Christians go to heaven.
Well, let me know how you are doing and feel free to PM me if you want to. We are both kind of in the same boat except that my boat already went under water, so I think I can be of help to others who might be facing a similar situation. I once aspired to be a counselor and I have a master's degree in psychology and a counseling license, but for various reasons that did not work out as my second career, so I stayed with my original career. I could have retired a long time ago if I wanted to but I am glad I kept my job since it gives me structure and stability and I like the work and the coworkers. Luckily I am permanently able to work at home.
Auch ICH könnte viiiel schreiben
Ich verstehe, was Sie für Ihre Katze empfinden, und bin hier, um Ihnen auf jede erdenkliche Weise zu helfen.
I think it is good to be a realist and prepare yourself mentally and emotionally as far ahead as you can. I did not do that so I experienced a sudden shock. On an unconscious level maybe I knew but I did everything I could keep it out of conscious awareness. I think we all handle such circumstances according to our particular circumstances and personality. I have always had to use avoidance in order to manage my anxiety so I could function in everyday life. It is quite a balancing act.
It doesn't sound like your boat is going down any time soon but I will be here if and when it does. My late husband was not active doing anything for years before he passed. He started to go downhill emotionally when he retired in 2016 but it was so gradual I was not alarmed, and he would never admit he as depressed although in retrospect I think he was. Then when Covid came he got much worse, refusing to even leave the house. After a while he started to eat less and less so it was a battle just to get him to eat one meal a day. The doctor was not as alarmed as he should have been about the weight loss since he did not have any medical conditions except chronic asthma, which was managed by medications. He was not diagnosed with cancer until about three months prior to his demise, he was misdiagnosed as having prostate issues and urinary tract infections. I think his whole case was mismanaged so I will be filing a complaint with the HMO and possibly also filing a lawsuit since that is the only way I will ever know what really happened. However, part of the problem is that he had no desire to live so he just stopped eating but the hospital allowed him to make that choice.
My husband and I slept in separate bedrooms ever since we moved into this house in 2009. I slept downstairs with the male cats and he slept upstairs with the female cats since we had more cats back then and we had to keep the male cats separate from the females. But by that time we were not intimate anymore anyway. Eventually the three male cats that had not passed on were brought upstairs since they were sickly and I started sleeping upstairs, but he kept a completely different schedule after he retired so he usually slept in the living room in the recliner watching TV. Even though we did not sleep in the bedroom together for very long I cannot sleep in there now so I bought a daybed and mattress for the living room. I do not expect I will go back to sleeping in that bedroom ever again. The cats like it though and I need the space for them.
My mother and father were the same age but he died at age 53 and she lived to be 93, in spite of smoking and drinking for most of her life.
Danke ,dass Du es verstehen kannst. Viel könnte ich über sie schreiben................sie war für mich die Katzengöttin BASTET persönlich.
Ich lebe im Bundesstaat Washington, USA. Nein, ich schreibe und spreche kein Deutsch. Ich spreche nur Englisch. Ich habe Google Translate verwendet, um zu übersetzen, was Sie geschrieben haben. Ja, ich verstehe, was Ihre Katze für Sie bedeutet und bedeutet, weil mir meine Katzen so viel bedeuten. Ja, ich verstehe, dass manche Dinge zu sehr weh tun, um darüber zu schreiben. Es gibt viele Dinge, über die ich nicht schreiben kann, weil sie zu schmerzhaft sind. Das ist einer der Gründe, warum ich versuche, in der Gegenwart zu bleiben und nicht an die Vergangenheit zu denken, aber das ist nicht immer einfach.
Thanks. I will just play it by ear.
You have the opposite situation from what I experienced. I was fighting to keep my husband alive for many years but he did not want to live and that gradually got worse and worse. He was like this even before he had any physical pain, but after he started having physical pain it was much worse. I was not aware of how much pain he was in because he tried to hide it. I feel bad that I did not know but my counselor agrees there was no way for me to know. He even hid it from the home health care nurse.
Your wife is fortunate to have you to support her. My father was an atheist when he died but he died suddenly of a heart attack so he had no time to fear death. My mother was afraid of death even though she was a strong Baha'i and she was 93 when she passed. My sister-in-law, also a strong Baha'i, passed at about age 63 of cancer and she did not fear death at all. A couple of years after that my sister, also a Baha'i, died of cancer at age 53 and she fought to stay alive, mostly because she did not want to leave her daughter alone.
