Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage. Any time or weather, you can't have one without the other. Oh boy. Hey, let's be honest. When's the last time you saw a horse and carriage? Actually, I've seen plenty of horses around, and even a few carriages, especially if you count cars (once know as horseless carriages), but a horse and carriage together? Oh boy.

It seems the second time around, this love and marriage combination is really tough to find. I've heard about love and disappointment, marriage and prenuptial agreements, and even love and sex, but that M' word seems to carry nasty connotations these days. Now in mid-life, I find myself having a hard time working with these concepts of love, marriage and sex (we'll talk about pre nuptials sometime in the future). I find a lot of other people confused about this stuff too. It's a lot different now, and more complicated.

When I was younger, women couldn't wait to hear proclamations of love. Saying I love you' was easy. And the gals couldn't wait to hear this. It was getting sex that was hard. Sometimes you had to say "I love you' to make getting sex easier. Now if you say I love you' too soon, you get lost in the dust (co-dependent, needy, stalker, etc). But now, in our forty's, sex is easier to get if you're looking for it. It's not that we are less moral, but many of us have gone over that 40 hill and are on the way down. We are not getting any younger, any prettier, we're alone, and what the hell, we are adults. Myself, I fell that love is now hard to find and sex is now easier to find. And this is probably because after decades of being preoccupied with sex, now I'm looking for love. I feel twenty years out of sinc.

In talking with many singles like myself, I still think there is a lot of confusion about love and sex. I remember a friend telling me after an overnight tryst with a young lady... that it sure felt like love'. I mean sex can be real nice (I think I remember), but it is not related to love. We often lump the two together, but they are distinctly different.

For some crazy reason, you often hear the phrase sex and violence' as if these to things are related, and they certainly aren't (except for a few sickos). My personal analogy is to think of love and sex sort of like, well,... ham and cheese.

We all know that ham (love) and cheese (sex) go very well together. They are a natural combination and much better when consumed together. If you get used to this combination, either one alone seems somewhat lacking. But now that ham is getting so hard to find, and because we are alone and hungry, cheese may to be a viable alternative, until we are lucky enough to find ham. The question is: is there a way to consume cheese for cheese's sake without needing ham with it? I mean we are adults right? So why do I feel like a kid every time I think about cheese?

I try to think of scenarios where plain cheese is OK. I'm an aging secret agent on a deadly mission. I could get killed at any time. You are a maturing movie star filming a movie 5000 miles from home. We're both overworked, tried, lonely, living one day at a time. We meet. There's chemistry. We're hungry. Cheese looks good. Cheese please. For us aging moms and dads who are overworked and lonely, wondering if we will ever have ham again, cheese sometimes seems better than nothing.

I met a nice gal who told me that, although she has already been married and has a child, she doesn't believe in premarital sex. Myself, I don't believe in pre-sexual marriage. It's not to be crass, but I'm a monogamous man. I mean, if I have to pick ONE pair of pants and wear them the rest of my life, shouldn't I try them on first? I mean, they might not fit perfectly, but wouldn't I want to know just where they pinch or rub before making a 30 or 40 year buy? I vaguely remember what cheese is like , but I'm beginning to forget what ham tastes like? I don't want to settle for salami or, god forbid, a hot dog. I want ham, imported and lean, served with a variety of cheeses, but I don't see it in the near future. Cheese isn't near as good as ham, but sometimes I get hungry. For us single adults, is it immoral to settle for cheese?

Any of this ever happen to you. I've got to go. I'm thinking about enlisting in the CIA ( if I'm not too old).