I Found Love at 39 and He Was Ten Years Younger
I was 39 years old and I had genuinely made peace with the idea that marriage might not happen for me. Not in a sad, resigned kind of way where you’re white-knuckling your way through other people’s weddings and trying not to cry. I mean I had actually looked at my life and thought, this is fine. This is genuinely good.
I went to the movies alone and enjoyed it. I went out to eat by myself and didn’t feel like I needed to hide behind a book to look busy. I was learning website design, I loved photography, I played guitar, I went to an exercise class. I was involved in a church, I was doing things I enjoyed, learning things I wanted to learn, and I had stopped spending energy wondering when my real life was going to begin. I was just living it.
And then a man ten years younger than me walked a grieving stranger to his car in a church parking lot, and everything changed.
The Church We Were Both Part Of
Before I tell you the love story, I need to tell you a little about the place where it happened, because the context matters.
I had been part of a high-pressure, deeply controlling evangelical church for eleven years by the time Honey came along. It wasn’t something I recognized as controlling when I first joined, most people don’t, which is part of how these things work. But over time it became clear that almost every aspect of members’ lives was managed and overseen by leadership. You had a discipler above you who monitored your decisions and relationships. You had people below you that you were responsible for overseeing in return. Every significant choice, every relationship, every plan required approval from someone in that chain. I know this sounds crazy, but we do crazy things sometimes when we are convinced we are doing things for God and He is happy with us. I’ll talk more about this in a future article.
Dating in this environment meant one supervised outing per week. Always with at least one other couple present, never alone together. You could talk on the phone a limited number of times each week. You saw each other at Sunday and Wednesday church services, but those were watched too, and if you lingered in conversation too long, someone would come over and gently retrieve one of you. Even going steady, meaning agreeing to date only each other, required permission from leadership. A marriage proposal required permission. Moving to a different city required permission. There was a church in every major city and you were expected to transfer your membership and your accountability structure wherever you went.
I had been navigating this system for over a decade. I had attended the singles dances they organized, where the men were actually challenged to collect as many women’s phone numbers as possible, so you never knew if someone asked for your number because they were interested in you or just trying to hit a quota. I had gone on hundreds of these chaperoned, structured, one-per-week dates. By the time honey came along I was completely exhausted by the whole thing and fairly convinced that romance inside this system was just not going to happen for me.
Which is probably exactly why it did.
The Parking Lot Moment
One of our first real date started with a funeral.
Honey and I had both been part of the singles ministry and I had noticed him from a distance, the way you notice someone when you’re paying attention to how they move through the world rather than just how they look. There was something about the way he was with people. Steady. Genuinely present. Not performing for anyone.
The couple I had spent years nannying for had also noticed us noticing each other, and I suspect they quietly arranged some of our early interactions around a shared church website project. “Sneaker” dates, basically. We had permission to meet and discuss web design, which sounds incredibly unromantic but actually gave us a chance to just talk like normal human beings without the whole chaperoned-date pressure on top of it.
This one particular date stands out. There happened to be a memorial service at the church that same Saturday for a member who had passed away. Since we only had one evening a week together and the service fell right at the start of it, we went. It wasn’t exactly the evening either of us had pictured, and I’ll be honest, sitting through a funeral as the opener to a date is a lot. But after the service, as people were filing out and making their way to their cars, I was sitting waiting and I watched what Honey did next.
He spotted the widower in the crowd. An older man, clearly devastated, struggling to get himself together enough to walk to his car. And without any fanfare, without anyone asking him to, Honey made his way over and spent the next twenty minutes just being with that man. Talking to him softly. Walking beside him. Making sure he got to his car safely before coming back.
Nobody asked him to do that. There was nothing to gain from it. He just saw someone who needed help and went.
I knew right then that he was a keeper. Not in a dramatic, lightning bolt way, but in the quiet certain way where you just think, oh, there it is. That’s who this person is.
The rest of the evening was good. We got coffee afterward and talked for a long time. I drove home thinking about that parking lot more than anything else.
The next morning at church I gave him a thank you card.
The Puzzle
Inside the card I wrote about the things we had talked about the night before, the way you do when you want someone to know you were actually listening. One of the things he had mentioned was that he enjoyed puzzles and figuring things out. So I wrote a little puzzle into the card that he would have to solve to get the full message.
I knew he would have to come back and find me to talk about it. And he did.
I want to be clear that I was 39 years old, completely self-sufficient, genuinely fine on my own, and I absolutely engineered a reason for this man to have to seek me out again. I have zero regrets about this strategy and I would do it again tomorrow.
What People Said About the Age Gap
When things became more serious between us, people had opinions about the fact that he was ten years younger than me. Some of it was said directly and some of it was implied, but the message was pretty consistent: I was probably too old for him, I likely wouldn’t be able to have children, and I shouldn’t be putting that limitation on someone who deserved a full family life.
This is the kind of comment that is dressed up as concern for him but is really just a way of telling you that you don’t quite deserve what you want.
Here is what I actually knew, which those people didn’t have access to: I had nearly raised my youngest sister. I had spent years as a nanny, following a family I loved across the country and pouring myself into their children as if they were my own. By the time Honey came along I had already lived so much of what raising children actually feels like, the joy and the exhaustion and the love and the worry, that the question of having my own felt less urgent than it might have for someone who hadn’t had those experiences.
I also had my own mother in the back of my mind, always. The kind of mother she was. The patterns I had grown up inside. I didn’t want to become her, and that thought was part of how I had made peace with the children question over the years.
When Honey and I were able to talk about our futures in the stolen moments the church allowed, I found someone who wanted me specifically, not a version of me with different circumstances. He was more than okay with all of it. And that was that.
The Proposal
After Honey got permission from leadership to go steady, we dated exclusively for about six months. Then he got permission to propose.
He planned a date and took me to a beautiful park. Under a gazebo, before he got down on one knee, he sang to me.
Back at One by Brian McKnight.
I was 39 years old and a 29 year old man was on one knee under a gazebo singing Brian McKnight to me. I mean, come on. What are you supposed to do with that except say yes.
We were engaged for three months and then we got married.
The Week Before the Wedding
I am going to give you the short version here because the full story deserves its own article someday.
The week before our wedding, with family already traveling to be there and invitations already in people’s hands, the couple overseeing our marriage counseling told us we could not get married if we were planning to move to Orlando within the first year. Honey’s company had been planning a relocation to Orlando for some time and we had always known we would follow when it happened. This was not a secret. But a new couple had recently taken over our counseling sessions and they had just figured out the timeline.
They said no. No wedding if you plan to move.
Honey turned in his resignation from his job that same week so we could get married. His company came back within days and asked him to stay, and we agreed to remain in Tallahassee for the first year. He would just be traveling a lot. The wedding went forward.
We walked into the ceremony to the Practical Magic theme. Our mothers walked up to the alter to light candles to the Notting Hill theme. And at the end, when we walked out as husband and wife, we chose the main theme from Star Wars.
We had briefly considered having the mothers walk in to the Imperial March. We decided against it. LOL
During the photos right after the ceremony, the photographer asked Honey to whisper something in my ear to make me smile. What he whispered was not suitable for a church setting. My face in that photo says everything. We were the only two people in that room who knew what had just been said, and I looked absolutely delighted.
I still have that photo.
Twenty Five Years Later
A regular Tuesday evening in our house looks like this. Honey is on one end of the couch reading science fiction on his iPad. I am on the other end knitting and watching whatever I feel like watching on television. At some point, without either of us discussing it, we are giving each other foot rubs. It just happens.
When we go out to eat, he brings his iPad to read and I scroll my phone, and we sit across from each other and hold hands across the table. We talk when something comes up. We don’t demand that the other person perform constant engagement. We are comfortable with each other in the way that only comes from a very long time of choosing the same person.
That is what 25 years of a good marriage looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. Not the big romantic gestures, though those have happened too. Just two people who genuinely like each other, sitting on a couch, giving each other foot rubs.
What I Want You to Know
If you are reading this at 38 or 42 or 47 and you have quietly started to wonder if you missed your window, I want to tell you something that I actually believe.
I was not looking for Honey when I found him. I had genuinely stopped waiting for my life to start and had just started living it instead. I was doing things I enjoyed. I was learning things I wanted to learn. I had arrived at a place where I was okay with who I was and what my life looked like, and I wasn’t performing okayness for anyone. I was actually fine.
I think that might have been the whole thing. Not a strategy. Not playing hard to get or following any rules about when to text back. Just actually being a complete person who was living her own life, and being open to whatever might happen next.
And then someone noticed me in the middle of that.
You don’t have to stop wanting love or stop hoping for it. But you might try filling the space with things that are genuinely yours. Go to the movies alone. Learn something new. Do the thing you have been putting off until life looks more like you thought it would. Finding love after 35 is more than possible.
And if someone comes along who makes you want to hide a puzzle in a thank you card just to guarantee you will see them again, go ahead and do that too.
You might be surprised who comes back to solve it.
Want to read more about my life and experiences at this age? Go check out my recent article about No Longer Feeling Invisible After 50: Showing Up Anyway
