Intro to Summer of Men: "Will we ever be in love again?" my sister and I ask each other.

The more time that goes by, two, three, five, seven, ten years our doubt increases. “You mean to tell me at 50 it’s over?” I ask aloud. To whom am I asking? My sister, myself, God?

God, are you there? Am I ever going to be in love again? What’s that? Maybe?

It’s been a maybe for over a decade. God, people, me telling myself, my sister telling me, me telling my sister, “You just never know, you could meet someone tomorrow.”

A decade of tomorrows. Right, that’s life. Let’s not get greedy. It’s not like I haven’t ever been in love. I have. Two times. Both men I lived with. Not at the same time. But two men, two loves in my 50 years. Love. Can’t control it. Effort? Oh, I’ve put in the effort. I’ve been swiping on and off for a decade. (Real life? What’s that?) I have been on so many dates. So has my sister. It makes me sick. It makes her sick too. All that swiping. I have them all written down. Piles of dates in my closet all stacked into a box of journals with my moth-eaten sweaters. Word documents too. I started documenting every single one of them as an attempt to make the date something beyond the date.

Which leads me to where I am now, Summer of Men. You see, after all these years of no love, of first dates, and a few two monthers here and there, at 49, after six years of no sex, I decide to have sex now and think about love later.

This wasn’t my ‘plan’. But then in early June, a month before my 50^th birthday, after my morning meditation, daily spiritual readings and coffee I turned on my phone.

Ding. My little sister texted me a picture.

A torn gold Magnum wrapper on the floor next to her bed.

Sister: I loaded up Tinder last night and got lucky. He was hot. So hot. 28 years old. A guitarist. I’ll never see him again, but I was in love. Fuck his body was hot. Hot.

Me: I’m inspired.

Sister: Wow, really? It’s about time. Clear away the cobwebs down there.

Clear away the cobwebs. What an image.

Maybe it was that and that alone that got me going. Cobwebs and that beautiful, gold, shiny Magnum wrapper. No, I was not going into my 50s as I did my 40s. It was overnight. Like something had been festering within me and that Magnum wrapper ignited the match. Lit my fire. Impulsive? Yes. Good, I needed to be impulsive.

Art by Patrick McCarthy

My 40s had been spent working, making money, or trying to make money. At first working for a purse designer. For five years I tried to sell unattractive purses in the valley. Burbank. Do you know how hot Burbank is in the summer? After five years the purse designer pretty much fired me. I agreed with her, I was no good at selling her ugly purses. Truth is most of the time when I was supposed to be schlepping a carload of purses around going from store to store, I was talking to Siri. I dictated a whole draft of a book to Siri. Anyway, after the purse job I worked as a companion to mentally ill and addicted women. I won’t go into that now, but it was a big upgrade in pay. I saved money, wrote about six more drafts of that book, got an agent, then another agent, a publisher. I’m way off topic here. This is about men. I’ll try not to go on any tangents. If I do, skip over. Or note to self, delete later.

Cobwebs. Gold Magnum wrapper. No sex. Entering my 50s. If love wasn’t happening, then at least I could be having sex. But could I? After all, I had tried. Tried to have casual sex. Unattached. Younger men. Older men. (No, that’s not true. Not older.) It just wasn’t happening. I had no follow through. I was a relationship kind of girl. My ex and I had been together for eight years. My sister and her ex-husband, ten years. Our relationship history was similar. If she could sleep with a man, not get attached, have a few experiences, surely I could too. But could I do it mindfully, with intention, without throwing myself away? Was that possible? And was it possible not to get attached? I’d always wanted to be more like a man. Not a man, man. But a man in the way that men don’t seem to have sex and get attached like women do. Yes, like that.

Summer of Men. An experiment.

Rendezvous #1: Am I a Predator? A Creepy Cougar?