Tra Bosco e Paese

I am not the kind of girl who likes to talk about my personal life. I like to keep some things private, but I have a story to tell and I thought I might do it here.

The story is about how I met a guy one August afternoon at a local festival, where we were both helping as volunteers and how we’ve been together ever since, as in together together.

At first I didn’t want to get together with him. Our worlds were universes apart. He was born and raised in a little Italian town, he’s never been outside of Italy; he hates reading, he doesn’t know anything about music, literature, politics, philosophy, art or science. He speaks Venetian dialect better than he speaks Italian and he knows like two words in English and not even. He’s a lumberjack who spends more time in the woods than he does around people. He’s all about rain, tractors, trees, mushrooms and chestnuts. He’s a real woodsman.

I was okay with all that, I actually always wanted to find a guy who was…well, a lumberjack!

What was actually standing in the way, like a huge wall, like a fortress if you like, was our age difference.

You can’t even tell we are not the same age and by now we are so used to each other that we ourselves forget about it. But at the beginning it was a big deal for me. I liked him but he was just a “little too young” for me and I’ve already had experiences with younger guys that ended up being a disaster, and I was just not into it.

The truth is that I wasn’t even looking for a guy, I didn’t have time to have a relationship. And I had enough worries in my life to have to deal with a boyfriend on top of it.

But I guess if we are meant to be we are meant to be, because he didn’t take any of my reasons seriously and he just refused to hear about them. I did try to make him reason, but he ended up convincing me that we could make it work and my walls came down.

There’s a terminology I came across recently that describes a relationship between partners with an age gap; it’s called May-December relationships, which indicates one partner is in the “spring” of life and the other in the “winter”. Ours is not really a May-December relationship according to the definition, I am not even close to the “winter” of my life, but it falls in the category nevertheless.

There are a few films that touch the subject; three come to mind: “Prime”, “The Rebound”, “I could never be your woman”; and then we have the Stars themselves, Demi and Asthon (never mind that they are divorcing), Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins who are not together anymore, and Geena Davis and Reza Jarrahy for example. Online you find a few blogs about May-December relationships/marriages and I’ve read all of them, including the articles on how-to-make-it-work.

I don’t think an age gap has anything to do with it. In our case we not only have age difference to think about, but nationality and cultural differences that add to it.

Still, we get along. We both like the same things, we think the same way, we have the same sense of humor, and we are both Taurus.

I thought I would add to the blog a section, “Tra Bosco e Paese” (“Between the woods and town) where I’ll write about the difficulties we encounter and how we deal with them, as well as the happy moments in our lives.

Happy reading!