Nothing to look forward to?

I have recently started dating.  Two weeks, two guys.  I guess when it rains it pours! There may even be a blast from the past.  I quite like my single life and am not looking for anything serious, but I do like to meet new people, and maybe go to a movie or  have dinner. 

Both guys were lovely.  Exactly the kind you would want to be your boyfriend, unfortunately, not MY boyfriend.  That old cliche applies, "it's not you, it's me."  They are wonderful, successful men, but I am just not interested in them that way. They could be the Prince of Persia and I would still have to say, "sorry, it's not you, it's me."   I just can't get into anything-- not now.  I am too busy being single. 

A colleague (a widowed woman in her 60's) asked me how my dating life was going.   We sat down one day over her file of exam papers and began chatting.  She too has been dating someone, a man in his 70's.  She has the same problem-- although the company is nice, there is something to be said about your OWN company.   As our conversation continued, and I listened as she spoke, I felt like I was talking to one of my girlfriends, not a woman in her 60's. 

How could it be that the man in his 70's that she described sounds EXACTLY like the men that I have dated/am dating in their 20's and 30's?!  Is there SERIOUSLY nothing to look forward too?  Does it really mean that ALL men really are the same?   So it is NOT going to get any better?!   Men are men regardless of age? 

As I went home and thought about this, I had a flashback to my first year university anthropology class.  My professor was a woman in her late 50's who had spent years living with a tribe in the jungles of northern Cameroon.  This tribe was polygamous and this was one of the topics she completed her research in.  She showed us a video she had made where she interviewed the woman of the tribe and they explained how they felt about their husbands having several wives.  I couldn't believe that these women with no education, no technology, no Oprah, and no Sex and the City, had the same things to say as any educated woman in the west.  They did not want to share their husbands, they did not like the other woman, they wanted to be loved and appreciated just the same as any other woman, but by a man who loved and appreciated only them. 

I guess we have more in common with each other than we think.