Thank you for your thoughtful response and explanation.

This is why I so like interacting with younger people. While I can introduce them to timeless movies made before they were born, like Midnight Cowboy or Manhattan, I can learn new and different ways of thinking from them.

One thing I have learned from your generation is that there are many different possibilities in how to build an intimate relationship, and you can have a great relationship without settling (down).

But your generation is bombared with constant stimulus and lots of choices yet more isolation than I believe is healthy. It isn’t that you are selfish as the media would have us believe, but your isolation emotionally puts you into a world of your own making.

The good in that is self sufficiency. You know how to love yourself and satisfy your needs much better than my generation. You have come to accept and understand that happiness is an inside job. You have perfected the art of living in the present. You can go online and get a date as easy as ordering a steak delivered.

When I was your age we were marching in the streets over the Vietnan war. Some of us were refusing the draft or leaving the country for Canada.

Today we have a criminal president and a corrupt “bought and paid for” political system and it seems too often the response from the younger generation is “Yeah, whatever”.

Dating online has never worked for me.

I do know that real love means putting the other person first, as you would hope they would do for you. It doesn’t mean being a push over or giving up your own interests and friends for the sake of your partner.

It’s more of a top of mind situation. What they want and need is just as important as your own wants and needs. True love requires some sacrifice.

Today everything is disposible. In my generation, if an appliance broke, we’d have it repaired. If our shoes wore out, every neighborhood had a shoemaker.

So maybe that is the difference. When your relationships wear out, you throw them away. When you put something in the trash, you don’t want to find it on your doorstep in a few years.

But other people aren’t like an old mattress or a broken hair dryer. Other people have these sometimes uncomfortable things called feelings.

I had a parrot for over 20 years. When I lost my job in the U.S, it was No Jobs For Old Mem. That became No Country For Old Men.

I had to leave America to live somewhere affotdable and I could not take my intelligent and verbal parrot with me. I had to find her a new home. She is likely happier there than she would be with me. So we “broke up”.

While we will never be together again, I still miss her and love her. If I were to see her, she’d be happy to see me too.

It’s too bad humans don’t work that way.