I was talking with my friend Beth yesterday. She, like me, is widowed after a long marriage. She, like me, lives an active life. She goes on expeditions with friends, travels, sees plays and concerts, and generally lives a whirlwind life.  

However, her friends keep trying to fix her up with men her age. They tell her about someone eligible, and they add that he is lonely, as if that was a selling point. “I thought about it,” she told me, “And though I do miss the intimacy and the sex, I have a good life and I don’t want to date anyone.” 

I agreed. I showed her a photo of my husband. He was a skinny man with a long face; he had a little pot-belly (his colon cancer wasn’t diagnosed yet when the photo was taken) and he has a cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other, held to his ear. His mouth is open; he has a droll expression, and is either telling someone a terrible joke or giving them a hard time, to the great joy of himself and his listener. 

I didn’t take the photo; his friend Rebecca did, and she discovered it the other day and sent it to me.

He had a lot of friends, male and female. 

He was also impossible. Our adult kid agrees that he was impossible. We talk about him fondly. For instance, today, we were fondly remembering how he never apologized, and what an asshole he was to our kid from time to time. 

“How am I going to match that?” I said to my friend after I showed her the photo, and she understood.

I met him when I had decided I wasn’t going to bother worrying about getting married or having a boyfriend, and I was just going to live my life. And then he showed up, and it wasn’t possible to do anything but fall in love with him.

I’m lonely, yeah, and I miss him. But I don’t want a man just to have a man. 

“I would get bored,” I said to my friend. “It’s fatal when I get bored. I turn into a jerk.”