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If You Can't Live With the One You Love...

My friends and I have had this discussion a number of times. What if...? We're superstitious so we don't want to verbalize actually losing our spouses. Instead we just say what if we found ourselves without them. What would we do? Eventually find another man? Well, who are we kidding? Older women have a hell of a lot harder time finding another man than men have finding another woman. And often enough it's another woman who's more likely than not "younger."

But even if we could find another man... We all thought about it. Meeting another man. Dating. Living together. Maybe even remarrying. It was curious. It sounded hard. It didn't sound like fun. It sounded like work. And if we couldn't live with the one we loved, well, did we really want to live with someone new? Someone with different quirks? Different habits? Different, period? A few of us decided we'd rather live alone. A few of us decided we'd rather live with each other, live with our close friends. We knew each other well, we shared the same interests, were well aware of each others' habits, loved the same sappy movies...well you get the idea. We could eat and get fat (who would care?). We could chat and gossip all the time. We could watch TV (we liked all the same programs). Damn, it would make life easy. Fun. Relaxing.

Okay, okay, you're all thinking (or maybe not which might be a problem) what about sex??? (MEN- SPOILER AHEAD).

One of the husbands who knew about our conversations immediately started to have fantasies about his wife and her girlfriends having hot sex together. Sorry to rain on his fantasies but none of us were into making a switch although I admit we talked about it. Then again, none of us were into abstinence. We all knew single women who lived alone out of choice and had sexual encounters with men. And we all had a a gadget or gadgets that more than one woman thought would be perfectly satisfactory ( and I mean the double entendre).

Of course we did consider the possibility of falling in love again with another man. Could any of us? Would any of us? Men did it all the time. A new love. A new life. Were we so down on the possibility, the idea even, for no other reason than sour grapes? How many women did we know who lived alone because they couldn't find a man? Plenty.

All I can say is we all found it comforting to know we had each other, that whatever we chose to do if something terrible happened to our mates, we wouldn't be alone. Another reason for having close friends.

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