This horrifies their parents - the builders who often endured lives of silent, emotional suffocation and stoic indifference. They married, bred, worked, accumulated assets, grew apart, stayed together, and died. My generation has refused to live in this emotional wasteland. We have had the money and the emotional strength to move out and move on. We are also the greatest optimists of all time. We believe that we can fall in love again.
Divorce and the ensuing separation are like death. At the beginning your heart and your mind are in overdrive. You remember the love so you mourn the loss. You pass through some of the stages of mourning such as regret, denial, fear and anger but you end up at indifference. As time goes by the personal contact is just about money. The kids grow up. The house is gone and there is less and less shared experience relevant to your life. Phone conversations become infrequent and almost an affront to your memories.
The major difference between death and divorce is that death continues to have an emotional hold. You are always sorry that the person you loved died. The memories stay there but they are present in pastel shades and the emotional edges blur. With divorce the mind eventually stops recovering the memories. Initially, there is also a hope of resurrection in divorce, which cannot be present in death.
We also become stronger in our righteousness. Data and events in our memory banks that don't support our position or emotional state meet the fate of all such data, regardless of the analytical application. It is lost in the analysis and excluded from the conclusion.
One day you begin to stir. You live alone and women are not part of your life except at the office. They are friends rather than potential partners and you never cross the line. What was acceptable behaviour as a young single man in the marriage pool is not acceptable from a middle aged divorcee. Clubs and hotels are not a possibility. You cannot approach women you have never met and know nothing about. This is the unconscious, physical approach of the young who haven't experienced or even thought about rejection.
But technology has created a solution. The internet provides the greatest courtship opportunity that the world has ever known. It has reduced the courtship completion chain from years to months or even weeks. There is a large, transparent and willing market. The email process removes the terror of face to face or telephone contact until the relationship is sufficiently entrenched to make the next step comfortable.
Email is the greatest evolutionary step in communication since the invention of the morse code. They are less formal and much faster than letters but create the same opportunity to express feelings and provide personal content. They have more emotional value than telephone conversations because they can be reviewed to get the message right and revisited to ensure that the reader understands.
There are no interruptions and no misconceptions. They provide an ongoing history of the development of a relationship.
Finally, they are a much, much faster means of communication. There are no postmen. Twenty emails a day can be sent, equating to a very long conversation in which both people have had the opportunity to receive, reflect and reply.
I find it amusing that some people consider online dating services to be aberrations in the very important process of people meeting people. More traditional processes were ineffi cient. You met people at work (full of legal pitfalls today), at clubs or pubs or through friends and relations. There was little choice and collecting personal information was a long, painful process. Baby boomers do not have the choice of continuing these processes today - we don't have enough life left.
One drawback of the whole process is the misrepresentation that occurs on the web. Just about everyone has had an exciting, fulfilling life and most of it has been spent in Tuscany or the south of France. No one is ever grossly overweight and they are all great cooks and can dance like flames. By the time that you meet you have already formed an emotional bond on the internet that is difficult to discard.
On a darker note, some women have had demeaning experiences at the hands of predators who think that dating websites are sexual smorgasbords. This is a great shame because it takes some courage to literally put yourself up on the internet block.
While people may not be exactly as represented, they are still usually interesting, adventurous achievers that have picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and are willing to start all over again. They are just looking for a nice woman or a good bloke.
What is certain is that online dating beats the alternative, which is to meet no one at all. I have met two women this way. Both are charming, clever people who have been alone for quite some time.
There is a lot of nervous energy consumed in moving from the ether to physical reality. You engage in a ritual dance that is a series of clearly defined steps... from coffee to commitment. There is also a desire to want to hurry that commitment to get to the lovely comfortable relationship that you had with your wife or partner before things changed.
There can be a tendency to hurry and to say that time wasters need not apply. I think there needs to be better distinction between those who are looking for a life partner and those who want a number of companions.
Internet courtship is more than dating for most baby boomers. The internet certainly facilitates an exchange of relevant information and there is a strong element of matchmaking in the process. It's a much more disciplined and structured process than we had years ago.
I lament the end of my marriage and recognise that my wife was the love of my life. But I am not prepared to stick to grog and golf with my sons and bachelor mates. Anything as good as love has to be part of my life. I have baggage - including wanting the approval of my sons, but so what. I will fall in love again.
