Diane and the Plan

I met this adorable woman named Diane at the gym. She is an older White woman in her early 50s that, much like me, lives in the pool and stays away from the actual workout machines. In a nutshell, she rubs me as one of those women that has never said an unkind word about anyone...that wasn't true at least; the kind of woman who recycles and donates old clothes and pays fundraising high schoolers to wash her car.
The other day we happened to be in the pool together for about two hours, and we got to talking about her life. She has been divorced almost as long as I have been alive from a man that was not quite as nice as she is. Everyone including his family was sad about seeing them get divorced, seeing that she's awesome and they are Catholic and he was an asshole. She said that when they divorced he told her she would never find anyone else, and as of now, she hasn't.
She was telling me that she has gone on E-Harmony and Catholic Singles and found that most of the men were either nuts or sex-crazed. She even met a guy at the gym who turned out to be a stalker, and another one that seemed cool, but dropped off the face of the planet. She found that the men she was attracted to most, the gentlemen, always ended up being gay.
"Maybe I am just too old-fashioned to date," she sighed as we walked back in forth in the pool with our foam weights. She told me that she had only been with one man sexually her whole life, her ex-husband, and that she found herself confused by the sex-crazed mentality of today's dating scene, even in her age group. She is just into the little things: dinner dates, water aerobics, and taking care of her pet dogs and birds.
Something about Diane reminded me of myself. What do you do when you are too conservative for today's relationships? How do you actively date while maintaining your dignity? You don't want to be alone, so do you do as the other daters do and ditch the dignity for companionship? I blog about this all the time at 24. It saddened me that this is a situation that middle-aged women are even facing. I guess a part of me was hoping it was an issue that would solve itself with age. APPARENTLY NOT!
But unlike myself, Diane has a plan. She said that she is simply going to continue playing with her dogs and water-walking; she is going to continue to work on getting healthy. Then hopefully someone worth a damn will fall into her lap when the time is right. Reflecting on the guys that have hurt me in the past and the losers that I rounded up online, I guess that is all you can do.