{"id":7426,"date":"2018-05-17T12:16:36","date_gmt":"2018-05-17T10:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7426"},"modified":"2018-05-17T12:19:15","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T10:19:15","slug":"template-matched","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7426\/","title":{"rendered":"Template Matched"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via reader Fay, a story<\/a> of a woman in her late thirties looking for love:<\/p>\n

Nearly three decades later\u2014even though my career as a\u00a0UN aid worker had seen me bounce all around the world and have all sorts of trysts\u2014I was yet to meet this fictional man. And yet, thanks to my over-active imagination, he\u2019d amassed an ever-growing list of\u00a0wonderful qualities.<\/p>\n

Where-oh-where was this romantic man, this tall and intelligent\u00a0Indiana Jones, who also happened to be funny, clean, gainfully employed, multilingual, emotionally astute and incredibly\u00a0deep? An old soul who exuded confidence, honesty and patience, and didn\u2019t feel an iota of insecurity around a woman who had likely travelled more than he had?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Him? He got married while you were gallivanting around the world with the UN having “all sorts of trysts”.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>\u2019d looked for him in bars, in airport lounges, at second hand book shops. I went on blind dates, where my\u00a0anxiety\u00a0over my apparently dwindling marriageability and\u00a0fertility\u00a0led me to trying to talk\u00a0myself into suitors who I would never have considered a decade earlier.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well yes, that dating pool does tend to dry up, just as Grandma warned. So she gave up, but what to do instead? Emphasis is mine:<\/p>\n

O<\/span>nce I made the decision to end the punitive (not to mention addictive) search for romantic love, once I decided that I was enough on my own, everything shifted.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

M<\/span>y soul-searching<\/strong> took me deep into the wilderness, from meditating and studying\u00a0Ayurveda\u00a0at an ashram in Kerala<\/strong>, to working on a farm on Mount Etna,\u00a0to going on a solo-safari<\/strong> in southern Tanzania.<\/p>\n

During that time, I focused my time and energy on, well, me, developing a\u00a0heightened sense of self-awareness. Stepping away from the demands of modern city living and social pressure to couple up induced a total spiritual transformation<\/strong>\u00a0– a journey on which I decided to give myself permission to pursue happiness and meaning in nontraditional ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I said<\/a> a few weeks ago:<\/p>\n

For most people, \u201ctravelling\u201d \u2013 as opposed to simply going on holiday \u2013 is something you do in your twenties before settling down into a proper job and\/or family life. But for single women, it\u2019s something they do well into middle-age and perhaps beyond, usually going to exotic locations where they talk in lofty terms about spirituality. There must be a pretty big market for this: reasonably wealthy women who have nothing else to do during their annual holidays but jet off somewhere exotic for a few weeks or months of \u201cfinding themselves\u201d. I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going abroad to get laid, but they do seem a bit lost, as if going to a nice location will help fill the gigantic hole in their lives back home.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve noticed you don\u2019t see many middle-aged men going \u201ctravelling\u201d, it\u2019s nearly always women, and always alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Heh. On several occasions I’ve had women like this yell\u00a0“You don’t know me!”<\/em> when I’ve given them a brief, unsolicited assessment of their life situation. Alas, it seems I do. Fortunately, in this case there’s a happy ending:<\/p>\n

W<\/span>e need to be enough on our own, and to realise that in the end, we\u2019re never alone if we are connected to the deepest part of ourselves. That\u2019s why at the end of my journey, I married myself<\/strong> – on a beach in Zanzibar, of course.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which just leaves one question: tabby, Siamese, or tortoiseshell?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via reader Fay, a story of a woman in her late thirties looking for love: Nearly three decades later\u2014even though my career as a\u00a0UN aid worker had seen me bounce all around the world and have all sorts of trysts\u2014I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7426"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7429,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426\/revisions\/7429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}