Beauty Is on the Inside

When the kids were one and four, I more or less closed the door on my own dating life. Not dramatically — I just looked at two little people who needed me steady and present, and decided my love life could wait. I don’t regret that for a second. You only get one shot at being there while they’re small, and I wasn’t going to spend it chasing romance.

But here’s the quiet truth nobody warns you about: the door doesn’t necessarily open again on your schedule. The kids grow up, the years go by, and one day you look around and realise you’re older now, the world’s moved on, and finding a real partner has got a whole lot harder than it was at twenty-five.

A different game, a different man

Dating later in life, as a single dad with a body that doesn’t cooperate and a story that takes a while to tell, is its own particular struggle. I’m not the man I was. The market, if you want to call it that, isn’t built for blokes like me. And honestly, I’m not built for it either — the apps, the speed, the disposability of it all. It can feel like everyone’s shopping and nobody’s staying.

So I’ve had to sit with the loneliness of it. Not the desperate kind. The quiet kind — the empty side of the bed, the good news with no one to tell, the standing fact that you’d like to share your life and haven’t yet found the person to share it with.

What I got wrong when I was young

But there’s a gift buried in getting older, and it’s this. When I was young, I’ll admit it: it was physical attraction that got my interest. A face, a figure, the surface of a person. That’s what pulled me in, and I built more than one thing on foundations that shallow.

Life knocked that out of me. Pain, loss, the courts, watching people show their true colours under pressure — all of it taught me, slowly and the hard way, that beauty is on the inside. That a kind heart outlasts a pretty face by about fifty years. That you cannot build a life worth having on someone’s looks, and that the most beautiful thing a person can be is good, and honest, and someone you actually blend with when the lights are off and the romance has cooled into ordinary life.

I won’t settle

Which is exactly why I’m still on my own, and at peace with it more days than not.

I’ve already lived a stretch of life being unhappy with the wrong situation. I am not signing up for another one just to avoid being alone. I’d rather be by myself and whole than beside someone and hollow. If she comes — someone genuine, someone with that inside kind of beautiful, someone I actually get along with — then good, and I’ll know her when I feel her. And if she doesn’t, I’ve got my kids, my dog, my work, and a life I built myself.

So no, I haven’t cracked the dating thing. I’m not going to pretend I have. But I’ve finally worked out what I’m actually looking for, which is more than I could’ve said at half my age. I’m looking for the kind of beauty you can’t see in a photo. The kind that’s still there at 3am, and in the hard years, and when none of it’s easy.

I’ll wait for that. It’s worth waiting for.