Title Goes Here.

In response to Erica’s last post… she may love google, but google and I are not friends at the moment. The reason is that it led me to a site that tricked me into downloading something that gave me a virus. Now everytime I search google for something, the only thing that comes up is porn, or trick links that lead me to download even more viruses. Also, every time I click from one website to another, which happens a lot if you consider facebook, an error message comes up that tells me I have a virus and I should download something to get rid of it. This is another trick and it just wants me to download more viruses. FUN huh! These error messages are so weird, because they look exactly like Windows messages, but there is the occasional exclamation or spelling/grammar error so you know that it isn’t real. Kent thinks that they were put there on purpose by the makers, sort of like, if you are dumb enough not to catch the mistakes, you deserve to get a virus. Which is probably true… I mean if you are smart enough to make a CRAZY INSANE virus you probably know basic grammar. I was just thinking that English wasn’t their first language. Then again I don’t know why I am analyzing these virus makers, when I should be hating them.

I read the Globe and Mail, National Post, and London Free Press on my lunch break pretty much every day, or as much as I can get through of them. Today in the Globe and Mail I read this advice column, and I really loved the response to it… so much that I searched for it when I came home from work and now I am putting it on here to share with you. I bolded the parts that are the reason why I like it:

A reader writes: I am a well-established professional in my mid-40s and am currently going through a difficult divorce after 20 years of marriage. The first 10 years were very good, but then our relationship deteriorated and she became abusive. With the help of good counselling, I found the courage to leave. We have been separated for 10 months and I do not intend to reconcile.

Recently, I met an incredible woman. We have been dating on and off for about four months. I feel this incredible connection to her. She is, however, 20 years younger than me, but very mature for 26.

Do we have any hope for success as life partners given our disparate ages? Should I continue to pursue this relationship? And should I tell my ex? I have never lied to her, but telling her about my new love interest would destroy any chance of a negotiated divorce settlement. Any advice?

Dear Lucky in Love,

Kiss. But don’t tell.

Huzzah, as the cowgirls say, huzzah! Luxuriate in your new paramour. You deserve her.

Fly her to the desert when the rare Mexican poppy is in bloom. Rent a cabin and fish lake trout for dinner. Recite The Cinnamon Peeler in the middle of the night. Start smoking Century Sams. Join her punk band. Surrender to the adventure and the abundance of her youth. After a decade of living in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? you are in a Noel Coward play. There is no doom. And everyone lives in bathrobes.

A new lover is the antidote to the last. After so much poison, you have found your anti-venom. While I want you to fall in love with a monk’s rapturous devotion, I also want you to remember that youth has a catch: the propensity for sudden flight. Despite her maturity the world is, in her brief experience, composed only of open doors. And she must, like the heroine of her own fairy tale, walk through them and experience the contents of every room. You may be one of the rooms or you may be all of them. Only time, that belligerent truth serum, will tell.

Age gaps can be the source of some rubbernecking. People stare as though the couple, like any physical aberration, is a mismatch. When really our ages, in their crudest form, are only numbers – shapes on a page. Harold and Maude taught us that an age gap can be a prescription for living – higher than any spiritual order.

You Owe Her Nothing Tytler and Just Be Firm Stern say it: Do not tell your wife. You have no obligation. It would be like presenting a piece of heirloom lace to an ogre. She will tear it apart. Break that long-standing habit of full disclosure and finalize your settlement intact.

Jejune Chatter Frolick makes a keen point: “Go to India for at least three months. Alone.” India being the catchall for seekers, I will interpret this more broadly to mean: Insist on some self-reflective solitude. Allow your paramour’s appetite to be contagious. She is not the only one living in a world of open doors.