Is this it?

A good friend died recently. At 49. A very fit – and seemingly healthy – person. Gone. Just like that. My friend is now a widow. At 46. They didn’t have children and every day I think of her and my heart breaks a little. They had the perfect relationship and in the world I inhabit – of disposable online dating, broken promises and human behaviour at its most base – they were the test case for hope. How the bloody hell she is going to get up every day and live without him, I cannot even begin to fathom.

And, if you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, it has got me reflecting about my own life. I recently had another birthday. Another step into the perplexing world of middle age. Although I am told I don’t look my age, sometimes I sure as hell feel it. The wrinkles, the crushing tiredness (yet inability to sleep beyond 4am), the weight gain that happens with every calorie ingested and not burnt off, the rapidly-decreasing eyesight and, lastly, the being in the dating ‘no-man’s land’ (where guys only want me as a MILF or, conversely, to be their carer). And I started to think “what if this is it? What if my best years have gone?”. “What if, with that, I am going to be a born-again ‘old maid’?”

But though I feel all these things in startling technicolor, do I feel scared? The answer is, no, not really. I sometimes feel sad. Deep, visceral sadness that I haven’t found my ‘person’ and, with every passing year, the growing realisation that I’m probably not going to either. But I also feel calm. Calm and content with the things I HAVE got. I have a comfortable life, do things that make me happy and keep me active and busy. I have amazing family and friends and feel that there is still lots left to discover in the world.

And – and this is the icing on the cake – I am the luckiest person in the world to have my daughter. My beautiful, caring, clever, empathetic and downright hilarious bantersaurus who is about to hit double figures. As she waved goodbye to me out the window this morning, smiling from ear to ear, I knew I wouldn’t change a damn thing. In fact, it made me even more resolved that all the Tinders and POFs and Happns (and don’t get me bloody started on the Bumbles) as well as all the wastemen I have been living in the past and moping over – can go to Hell because, for the foreseeable future, the only love I have to invest will be in her.

So, if this is it, I say “bring it”!