What are the odds?

What would you say the odds are for a genuinely nice woman to have managed to slip through the cracks in society and make it to, say, age 45? Make it to that age without the usual neuroses, paranoias, hangups, and other snags and pulls and runs in her psychological fabric that way too many women my age seem to have now?

Good? Not good? Middling? Impossible to calculate?

I am slowly coming to realize that maybe such women actually do yet exist. I know that based on what I've written here over the last year or two, I shouldn't be this optimistic, but I've generally had a habit of not asking new people to pay the sins of the old, and I really do try to start everyone off with a neutral balance. I find myself a little on guard, though, because experience since my divorce (and, really, in my marriage) has shown me that way too women have way too many little wrinkles in their minds to make them a good fit with the wrinkles in my own.

And yes, of course, I have them. I expect a lot from people, I tend to burn people out, I tend to be overly disappointed, and I tend to expect them to be too much like me.

But I've been working on these things. The more I have, the less inclined I am to think I'm somehow broken, somehow defective in some crucial way. What I've needed is someone who doesn't start out with that assumption, someone who doesn't take it as her personal mission to fix me (or to force me to fix myself in ways that I'm not really broken). And that means, someone nice. Someone gentle. Someone without prejudice and with a fairly firm grip on both practicality and imagination.

Maybe I've come close in the past, but maybe I will be coming closer still.

We'll see soon.