I’ll Never Fall in Love Again

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This is the first blog in a series. To read the series, click here: Archive: The ThirdAge Romance Saga of Sally Franz.

“I am sooooooo over marriage! I obviously have a broken picker and will never ever date again unless at least 45 of my closest friends approve of my choice.” Yes, I said those words and I meant every word when I signed my second divorce papers. Heck, even long term relationships that end can feel like divorce. And I have had scads of those.

Breaking up is that horrible feeling that creeps up on you like a bad case of the flu. One day you just know that you cannot go on and keep breathing. This of course comes after months, lo years of making the best of it (You made your bed now lie on it.) Thousands of dollars are spent in therapy, workshops and buying self-help books. Decades, lo millennium of checking my tone, my words…stating “I-feeling” messages, not “you-demands”. But when it comes down to it, the best advice I ever got about my relationship fiascos was from my dear friend Alberta who upon one session with the couples shrink declared, “I get it. I am not the crazy one.”

So if I am not the crazy one (and yes, I know that can be disputed by a stadium filled with men who know me), but for argument’s sake let’s say I am not doing the time warp dance as Pink Floyd’s lunatic. Then how do I end up with crazy ones, what gives? Here’s what I do not believe. I do not think it is karma that I have had two divorces and three engagements flop and too many dating relationships gone awry to list without being pathetically humiliated. My basic theorem here is that I am generally a nice person, I am agreeable and over the years I have even learned to ask directly for what I need (thanks to various books and Tony Robbins’ workshops). I have even learned (thanks To CNVC.org, Marshall Rosenberg) to get what I need for emotional happiness all by myself. My mantra is: “The recipe for agony is having a legitimate, real emotional need and making it person specific.” Yadda yadda. Goody goody gumdrops, I can take care of myself. Now how do I avoid the bozos?

What I think is there are simply a plethora of unhappy people masquerading as happy people. In fact, these unhappy people become juiced up on the idea of romance, even the idea of marriage when they are ill-equipped to carry out the fantasy. Here are a few tips that you are skating with an elephant on emotional thin ice: One: the person you meet is jovial, almost to the point of hysteria all of the time. Second clue: the person wants to rush to the commitment stage because you both seem to mesh on every topic and candidate. Third: and this is the green flag to run as fast as your little legs can carry you…his friends (and he doesn’t have many) say in whispered tones “Chris is like a new person around you.” Well, heads up Chris IS a new person around you; that is because this very troubled person is an adrenalin junkie. The idea of romance makes him be his very best happy self around you. Sound familiar? Well, you my friend are dating a happiness chameleon.

Happiness may be, as the song says, “like a room without a roof”. But it’s not so happy when the roof is blown sky-high from your rage that the person you aligned your life with is an alien life-form posing as a happy person while dating, but behind closed doors this individual makes Godzilla look like a baby bunny.

So I declared three years ago, I was done with romance. After all I had my fair share along the way. That of course was under the assumption that romance was a commodity with a limited supply. Yes, I can hear that old sixties song by Ronan Keating, sung by Dionne Warwick, “What do you get when you fall in love? You only get a life of pain and sorrow, so for at least until tomorrow, I’ll never fall in love again.”

P.S. Don’t declare to God and the Universe that you will never ever do something.

To be continued . . .

Sally Franz is a former stand-up comedian, motivational speaker, and radio host. She is a twice-divorced mother of two and a grandmother of three. Sally has a degree in gerontology and several awards for humor writing. She is the author of Scrambled Leggs: A Snarky Tale of Hospital Hooey
and The Baby Boomers Guide to Menopause.