Last night one of my girls was on a dating site looking for a possible partner for one of my friends who’s husband died after playing a game of football. He was one of the good guys who died young.
So she is one of a huge number of people who is looking for love, 2nd time around. Most people have different reasons, the most common being a marriage break up. On this particular site there were over 10,000 men online looking for ……….. well various things I guess, but ultimately for a new ‘life partner’. I put that in inverted comma’s because it is no longer the norm for people to have one life partner even though most of us contend that we are monogamous, I think it has come to mean one partner at a time.
In my youth it was already becoming commonplace for marriages to break up and for people to start again and of course there are the elderly where typically the woman has a much longer life expectancy than the man, so naturally is going to want some new male companionship in her dotage.
Back in the day when life was simple, you stayed on the farm or at your job for 40 years and earned a gold watch, life was more about survival and getting enough money to be comfortable. The pace of the world was relatively slow and people were comfortable with that. Relationships were ‘until death do us part’.
Today life is fast, the world has grown smaller and there are opportunities to taste and try many things. Our standard of living is far higher leaving us comparatively with greater disposable incomes, and the world is our oyster. This opens us up to many more temptations and we go through many cycles of life. We move to new towns, cities or countries, we experience new cultures, we have many jobs, our social groups expand and for a much larger percentage of people, relationships fade away. They die for lots of reasons, but I think the fast pace of life in the 20th and 21st centuries is a major factor. As they say, change is the only constant.
Last year, one of the schools I went to, Auckland Alternative School had a school reunion. One of my old school mates who now lives in Australia was asking if his old girlfriend was coming and although he is in a relationship, that was the factor that would determine whether he was going to come, no one knew what had happened to her and neither of them came. The reunion was advertised on Old Friends which is also a site well known for people looking to find the old school girl or boyfriend.
Of those that did attend the reunion, only a few of us were still in long time relationships, most had split up and were single again or in new relationships. Whilst I have been in a long term relationship, married for many years, I had previously come from a 7 year relationship and I am my wife’s second husband. So I fit the mold as well.
Anyway, next month I am attending Song Summit Sydney S3 which is the first event of its kind for song writers in Australasia. I have applied to perform to a panel of songwriters, publishers, managers, broadcasters, producers and A & R professionals, which the blurb says is ‘not for the faint hearted’. Like American Idol in a way, but hopefully more constructive.
I’ll be performing my new song Old Flame, which to bring this blog to it’s conclusion was motivated by seeing my old school mate and so many other people, looking for that old girl or boyfriend that they lost track of, that could have been ‘the one’. When I look at websites like Old Friends and track the number of people who want a 2nd chance, I am amazed at how many there are. I hope my song goes down well and that they like it’s construction, because I think it is very topical and many will relate to it, which in my book is a key criteria for a good song.
If you’d like to hear it, check it out on my MySpace page and let me know what you think.
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