He’s 60, She’s 30. Can It Work?

I got a call from a friend the other day. He said, “Joshua, I met a woman that I’m so in tune with. I feel her energy.  Our chemistry is out of this world. It’s wild. When we talk, we completely understand each other. It feels like I’m touching her when I’m not. I relate to her and she relates to me. But there’s just one issue. I’m 60 years old, and she’s 30. How can I make her want to get together with me?”

Listen carefully to that phrase he used: “How can I make her want to get together with me?”

If you have to work at getting somebody to want to get together with you, it means you’ve gone into salesman mode. You’re trying to sell somebody on the benefits of something.

You may as well say it this way: “Hey, I’m a great guy! I can pleasure you in bed better than any other man ever could. I’ll be cool even when I’m older. I’m wise, which means I can teach you so much…”

And on and on and on.

But that’s not how things really work. The moment you fall into salesman mode after you’ve met someone is the moment you give up any and all power in the situation.

Here’s the truth: A 60-year-old with a 30-year-old will not work for the long term. It just will not. It can not.

A 30-year-old woman has a lot going on in her life, and many more things she will want to experience. She may want a family. She has things she wants to do and things she wants to experience in the future. And when she’s 45 or 50, she won’t want to be with a man who’s 75 or 80 by then. And that makes perfect sense.

But that doesn’t mean my friend should break off contact with this young woman. Life is all about seizing the moment. When people meet and are drawn towards each other, that doesn’t mean a relationship must be permanent. It can be something that lasts just a week or two, or three or four months, or a year or two.

Everyone in life who crosses your path has a message for you. People enter your life to teach you things, and there’s things for you to learn from them. That’s the beauty of life, and it’s what dating is really all about.

After I told my 60-year-old friend to be honest with the young woman, he asked me, “What if she doesn’t want things to go any further with me? What do I do then?”

I told him to explain, “I’m 60 years old, and you’re 30. You are an experience for me, just like I am an experience for you. We’ll share things, we’ll learn from each other, and our time together will end when it’s meant to end. But in the meantime, why deny the connections we share? Why deny ourselves this experience? We can both grow so much as people through it. That’s what expanding yourself is all about. I understand you may have fears about it, but I don’t expect to spend the rest of my life with you. I don’t expect that you’ll be wheeling me around a nursing home 15 years from now. For now I’m young, I’m vital, and we have something that I’m excited about exploring.”

And leave it at that. Most people can’t do that though, thinking that having the possibility is better than facing possible rejected.

I encourage you to step into uncertainty. That’s where all of the greatest gifts of life are hiding!