Dear Valeria, I am a 50-year-old single by choice, but I have always felt the lack of a partner by my side. Last summer something rather unusual happened to me. I was in the pharmacy, and once I reached the counter, another customer next to me, a cheerful and sociable girl, approached me to give me advice regarding my ailment, very common at my age, back pain. Once we left the shop, we had a chat, and being someone who doesn’t try, let alone at the first meeting, I heartily thanked him and left. In hindsight, however, I thought that she would have at least expected the number to be exchanged, something that someone else in my place would surely have done. Of course today with social media, knowing the girl’s name and the area, it would be easy to track her down, but I’m not used to social media. A missed opportunity? I still wonder that to this day. And the back pain hasn’t even gone away.
Pablo, Milan
Well dear Pablo, I fear that the answer (not regarding my back) is contained in the first lines of your letter: “I am a fifty-year-old single by choice”. It seems to me that things are going exactly as they promised they would go. The young lady left the pharmacy and went her way, and above all she went hers. You ask me if in my opinion the girl in question would have hoped for a coffee, a date, an exchange of telephone numbers or even a more surprising and imaginative gesture? In my opinion yes. We women (forgive me for the generalization and all the other ladies I bring up without permission forgive me) are waiting for nothing more than a move, even a small one, even from a stranger or semi-stranger, that will make our day, our year go round. , the future. In reality, as long as he remains measured and respectful, all we can do is hope for a “flip” from a man. Especially today when even those who have been around us all our lives are no longer capable of “flirts”. We would really like a healthy bearer of imagination or irony who had the desire and grace to amaze us even just to improve a boring journey or to straighten out a bad day, even just for the desire to stand out and remain impressed, for the pleasure of to make someone smile, to gratify a woman you’ve never seen before, to give her a more confident step and a more decisive smile.
But to succeed in these small feats of grace it is essential to have the desire to “give yourself”. The day he’s ready to do it will amaze a stranger as much as himself. And I suspect her back pain will go away too.