How it feels not to want it
Words & images © Paul Ransom
The phenomenon of the older single retiring from the dating game is now widely established. The reasons are likewise well documented. Although the fantasy of the great love and less heady dreams of companionship may persist, the gathering of bruises and other wisdoms, in tandem with the dawning of a greater emotional self-reliance, tends to mitigate against the manifold risks of a return to the arena. If you are happy, even simply content being single, why would you bother dating again?
However, although I am that guy – solo and celibate since 2012 – and have embraced partner-less life with a mix of relief and, yes, sheer joy, there is something about it that troubles me. For it is one thing to go without, another to stop wanting.
As 2026 begins, I am reminded that the last time I felt the spark was in late 2015; and that by the first week of January 2016, it had sputtered out. Since then, nothing. The odd bloom of warmth, (and one woman whose attention I briefly felt myself becoming addicted to), but nothing like a fire. No swoon or rush, no imagined future, no thinking sweetly and amorously of her.
While it is easier, perhaps prudent, not to pine for what you are unlikely to get, I cannot help but wonder if notching up ten years unswayed is anything to celebrate.
Typically, we think of ‘transcending’ desire as a badge of maturity, if not enlightenment. So too, the peace and calm of living without the need for validation or completion in the guise of another. Indeed, I have extolled such things elsewhere on this site.
- Ten Years Without Sex
- The Benefits of Sexual Invisibility
- I Will (Almost Certainly) Not Be Your Valentine
In private, though, there remains a node of sadness. Not crushing, nor even nagging. More like the occasional pang. As if the body were remembering. Mourning. Stuck on the ground, tending beautiful feathers.
At 60, I ponder the high likelihood of an unromantic future, and ask myself if such cool and steady decline is what I most want. Maybe I would rather be mad than wise? Perhaps, despite all the hard won balance, I am just dying to feel more alive. To want something more than an autarky of mirrors.
But then I pause…take a centring breath…remember. The high was short lived, the come down drawn out and horrible. I gave myself to the spike and it so nearly took everything. Better to soar and cry to love songs and K Dramas, and to adore, for a few seconds, shopgirls and passersby. I can want them, almost love them, then let them go without wrench or cringe. Or, failing that, dip into the body’s archive, which lets me stream the rapture on demand.
So yeah, dating? Nah, probably not.
Some will think this gutless. Wrong-headed, bitter, borderline misogynous. Yet, I did not become a senior single because I felt wronged, or because women were to blame. (In truth, I treated my loves as badly as they did me.) Neither did I give up after the first set back or shy away from the possibility of pain. I took the risk, as we nearly all do, and paid the standard fee. Frequently.
Should you feel impelled to patronise me with platitudes or advice – don’t give up, you deserve love – please remember that the real point here is not so much an aversion as a lack of desire. The difference is worth noting. One could be considered a rationalisation, a decision. The other is more physical, an animal/chemical logic.
Don’t get me wrong, I still look at women and think, wow. I still imagine. It happens most days. But it does not last. I turn around, she walks away, and it’s gone.
And yes, before you ask, I do still adhere to a sensible prostate health regime. Red blood, it seems, still flows. No dysfunction in that regard.
Saying it like that, however, makes me sound more teenage than old age. Lust without love. Have I regressed? Or is it that I never truly grew up, and everything that felt like love was in fact a hormonal imposter, a pair bonding impulse overwritten with literary flourish and sustained by a beguiling cocktail of habit and low self-esteem?
This is what gives me pause. Not being single or incel, but the unshakeable idea that even my love was a party drug. And now that my lust is as transitory as a hankering for chocolate, there is no build. No baseline truth to be repeated as intoxicant lies.
If I had known, as I walked away in the pre-dawn light from the last kiss I ever shared, would I have changed course? Would I have tried harder to convince her? Myself?
I doubt it. The wounds were fresher at 50, the memory of break-ups and false starts more clarion. I was happy to climb into that cab and return to the sanctuary of an uncrowded bed. It felt more like escape than rejection.
Ten years on, I still have a sweet spot for her, as I do for many old flames. They are the affective memories that trigger the shivers I still feel. But that’s just it – all in the past. This is what I did not reckon on in January 2016.
As the creator of a long running love letter blog, and serial sucker for bittersweet romances and songs of longing, a decade with nary a hint of a real world crush scans like glaring omission.
I realise this says a lot about me and virtually nothing about the many splendid women I have met in that time. Yet perhaps I am not alone. Growing old and getting over it seem like a well matched couple.
To repeat, I am not tortured by this diminution of desire. Neither am I about to seek professional help or swipe for a fix. However, I do feel the space. The absence of something akin to magic. Belief.
Who better to fill this void than the wistful mistress of gentle melancholia; for she is always beautiful, always ready to love me back. If, over the last ten years, I have been reduced to dreaming from the sidelines, perhaps the dream is the thing. The desire that is not desire, the lack that is not lack. Because I already have what I want.
As If You Were Listening 