This is def a thread I needed to read! I’m 44 this year and have fallen completely in love with a friend of mine who is also a coworker on the same ward and is 17 years younger than me. She has quite literally been on my mind since September 2018 when we hooked up during a hedonistic work night out which resulted in me meeting the mother of my future child along with being the woman I would cheat on my then current fiancé with whom I already had a 5yr old daughter.
Yep, things got messy. I went into full hypomania mode around this time, split with fiancé and moved in with new girlfriend to then have a baby with about a year later.
Fast forward to 2023 and I’ve been on my own for over 1.5yrs. I’ve been seeing my eldest daughter 50% of the time and maintaining a beautiful relationship with her. See my youngest once every couple of weeks due to having been through alcoholism and a period of extreme suicidal thinking in 2022 about which her mum is understandably cautious. Working my way towards greater contact. And all the while my friendship and love for the girl I met briefly back in 2018 has been growing. We began working on the same ward at the start of 2022, realise we’re both really into similar things so meet up more and more regularly and get on amazingly. We’re both sober by Feb 2023 so begin going to the odd AA meeting and generally being very aware of the difficulties we both face in keeping out of the way of booze.
Things progress until one eve we’re kissing and it takes me nearly an hour to realise this isn’t a dream and this is really happening. 2 weeks later (around now) we’ve been having incredible sex, realising that we both feel love in a very different way to before and that maybe this could be the start of something pretty massive for both of us.
I’m still on cloud 9 every time i wake up just remembering that she is actually calling herself my girlfriend. That I’m allowed to go round and stay the night and that when I ask if she wants to come over she invariably says “yes”.
I’ve never NEVER loved someone like this and then become completely happy with them being just a friend after telling them I find them hugely attractive and another time that “I Fucking Love you” to then keep going AND THEN have them turn around one evening and actually fall into me and initiate a kiss that led to sex that’s led to an actual relationship.
And as amazing as it all may sound - believe me, she is stunning to me in every way. Beautiful inside and out with the warmest most incredible heart I’ve known and a taste for adventure I only dreamed about in other partners. Plus she’s training to be a mental health nurse like myself and has very similar diagnoses to me - we get each others weirdness and more than that, I think we love those parts too. I’ve struggled so hard to find someone who could see my odd behaviours and put them in the right context as she does it!
So what’s the problem? Yeah, the 17yrs age gap. Well, I only know that to me it has been and it definitely put her off for a while - we’ve spoken about it a fair bit, especially when looking back on why it took so long to finally get it all started.
And I do find that here and there I’ll feel and think I look very old compared to her and then will wonder whether at some point she’ll simply get scared at the thought of me being 70 when she’s only 53.
What does everyone think about this on here? I could do with some advice….I’ve never been in this situation before and want with all my heart for it to have the best chance of succeeding.