Late love as looking glass

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass

They say finding love later in life often looks different…not that love is different, it’s just that being older and having this accumulated expanse of a lifetime of hindsight and experience allows you to maybe write your own script of how you would want it to be. How did I want it to be?

I like to say I’ve grown into a more complete version of myself, and I guess I have. I have had plenty of time alone, which gave me the opportunity to discover different sides of me. Life changes us and I wonder if some of us gift ourselves with an easing towards a different life, imagining and inhabiting a different world and even an absolute different experience of love. Almost as if love finds us more than we find love – once the years strip away the uncertainties and the masks which blind us to the type of love which can only ever find us later in life.

So, how did love find Thom and me on that freezing day in Princeton, NJ, the half-way meeting place between Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the first moment we walked towards each other across that frigid square to tumble into each others’ looking glass of late love ?

It was as much similarities as it was difference, that’s certain… starting with a date – 1955! – the year we were both born. But the differences were as rich as the commonalities, and perhaps that’s what helped the pieces of our searching hearts fit so quickly and so firmly together.

I was raised Jewish, he was raised Catholic. Me, a left liberal who read the NY Times, he, an anarchist who hated the NY Times. But then also so many common threads…old hippies, MUSIC, TV shows, and we both knew all the theme songs from our favorites, and sang them together. Two suburban raised kids that grew up riding our bikes and playing in the woods.

He was the rock n roller/punk rocker who didn’t settle down or have kids till later. I was the gal that got married and had my first babe at 19. He loves and reads Philosophy and I loved knowing about it and discussing it with him. We both love poetry, but he writes it. If I had met Thom at thirty, I know we would not have worked at all. But that day at our mutual age of 65, it all seemed more than right.

These days we are settled in our love, even if it seems to deepen in small but more intimate ways each day. An intimacy which feels fueled by a fragile joy which can only come from our opening up into each other through the looking glass of our admittedly unique sense of quirkiness, our openness to honor – especially, even – the weird we find in each other and in life.

We’re all a little weird, life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love. A deeply conspiratorial love which perhaps can only be found (or can only ever find us!) later in life.

I like to dream about mirrors, that there is a mirror world somewhere a little like ours but different at the same time, and even you and I are different. I like to believe whatever world we are in, we are in love, and we are, in so many increasingly rich ways, together. Pieced together, locking finally into an easy dance which has the power to startle us still with its surprising insight: its daily gifts of recognition of ourselves, affirmations of each others’ lightness and shadows too, all through the looking glass of the other, lit warmly in the glow of late love.

I think we both are coming to a profound recognition that late love, the kind you can only tumble through together in a single step of abandonment, never comes too late. At least the kind we’re coming to experience seems and feels like it has and will endlessly continue to happen just in time.