All these things helped me to heal my battered psyche. I even took up yoga, which I now commit to regularly. I kept to my six-times-a-week gym schedule at L.A. I wanted to emerge from this as emotionally healthy as possible. I sought help from my family, friends and a professional counselor as I wanted to be truly free of whatever damage had been done over the course of the messy breakup. Although we had never married, I can tell you that recovering from that relationship was tantamount to dealing with a death or divorce. Turns out, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.įirst, though, I had to untangle my mangled emotions. And I had always been told once a gay man hits his 50s, “paying for it” was the norm. I mean, I had always sensed that aging in youth-oriented Los Angeles, and having the ability to find love in the middle ages, would not be pretty. What would I, as a 55-year-old gay, Latino man living in the Valley, have to offer the dating world?

After the dissolution of my 21-year relationship, I found myself in a unique situation.