I’m guessing (although I am certain, really) that each of us have no idea how our current crisis affects those around us.

When I was 30 and went through my mid-life crisis (although, secretly, I’m hoping that ‘mid-life’ is not literal), I think it must have been hell for those around me.

Hell and very, very boring.

Worse still if you aren’t that close to someone. Worse still if they are just an office colleague that you aren’t close to but that you work with. Much, much worse if, as it seems, both partners have just reached 50 and are both having that mid-life crisis at the same time!

For that’s the way it seems.

“Can you just check on your websites if you can find the telephone number for this person?”, she asks.

I don’t know who it is but I’m certain it’s a friend of her husband. She goes on Facebook – but not as herself. She doesn’t want to be on Facebook. But she looks all the same.

“See if you can find pictures of these people?”. She wants to see what they look like. Of course, she’s clutching at straws.

“You know”, I said, yesterday, “you should be careful what you look for because you don’t know what you may find”. I have a wisdom built up from more than one occasion. Now I understand why the old people have so much of the damned stuff. I am, after all, old and, therefore, experienced and, therefore, have wisdom. Damn!

And, yet it won’t stop her. She is determined. She explained that she found the full details (phone number, address, etc.) by using directory enquiries. Finding one bit of information at a time. So as not to be considered suspicious.

She says she knows what I mean (about being careful because of what you might find).

Some mornings/days, she is almost in tears. When it’s like that she can’t talk to me. I feel sorry for her. I also don’t really want to know. We’re not really close, after all.

Her husband IS on Facebook. She’s told me some things about him. And things about some of his friends. It’s a marriage with problems. The problem is that he’s an Italian man (enough said) and the problem is also that she’s 50 ……. and trying hard not to be.

Age is a pain in the arse, really. For women it means you cannot look your age and you have a fixed time to have children. For men there’s the ‘not being able to get anyone else’. Or, rather, I should just miss the ‘n’ off ‘men’. Now I know different.

But I know that, in spite of my outstanding wisdom on this point (not that I have ever taken my own advice), she will continue until she finds out everything. Or, rather, until she finds some indiscretion. And then, depending on the parties will to fight for something or not, the end or a re-start.

And, even if she’s not close to me, it’s a shame.

And the amount of effort this all takes! I know it does, of course. It takes a lot of effort to find information that is, whilst not exactly secret, difficult to find. And then, to find it in such a way as to make the finding of it secret.

Until you spill the beans. The point at which you show your cards. And then? Well, then depends, of course. Depends on the relationship and, more importantly on the two people involved. It depends upon both of them wanting to ‘make it right’. As soon as one of them doesn’t, then you’re just sliding to the end.

And, however bad things are, there are times when you have doubts. When it seems that what you (think you) have is better than the horror of what you don’t yet know. The horror of being single.

But I am wise now. It is a horror (for some people and, certainly, for me) but one that doesn’t need to last. If you don’t want it to. There is a future and it’s yours to shape.

In the meantime, this tragedy (for that is what it is) of the secret searching and the secret finding and the trying to be more powerful than the other (because knowledge is power, isn’t it?) and the playing of what you think are aces, etc., etc. is tiring. Both for them and for us – the us that have to listen and watch.

Life is bloody difficult, isn’t it?