I’m single, again, after sixty-one years of marriage – a growth in love, I call it.

Quite soon after my wife’s passing five years ago, I began thinking of my new status, singleness, as a  learning time. My thought was that I was becoming single, and had a lot to learn.

Not a surprising thought, really, because I’ve been helping people learn in much of my work – in college teaching, as a planning consultant, in some aspects of estate planning, as a writer, and in interpreting historic places and objects.

So now I’m the learner, the single student and at the same time teacher, transitioning from couple-dom to singleness. (Do I ever graduate?)

I’m committed to growth as a single – personal, social, sexual and spiritual, and without having had much practice at it for a very long time, but alert to the ways I can learn.

A bonus in the process is enjoying shared experiences with others,  accepting that we have much in common although each is unique in many ways.

I’m writing out what friends and acquaintences are sharing, preserving their words with minimal changes, safeguarding privacy carefully, and on occasion, dividing responses into more than one posting.