So I was listening to NPR and an interview came online with Nuala O'Faolain - an Irish writer who died recently at 68, she was single

In this interview she talks in depth about her feelings about being single and middle aged - I found that perhaps it offered some good contrasts and insights for the growing population of single women who are headed towards middle-age in the next decade.  Logistically, you just have to face the fact that you probably will never get married, bec. there just enough males in the church ... so, I found Nuala's thoughts very interesting to mull over when being reminded again of this very real challenge that faces the Church in the ensuing years

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=90371362

Fresh Air from WHYY, May 12, 2008 · Irish journalist and author Nuala O'Faolain died May 9 in Dublin of lung cancer at the age of 68. A radio and television broadcaster, O'Faolain was well known as an opinion columnist for The Irish Times even before her first memoir, Are You Somebody?, made her a best-selling author. Published in 1996, that book chronicled her childhood as the second of nine children growing up poor in Ireland during the 1940s and '50s. She described herself in the introduction as "a nobody, who came of an unrecorded line of nobodies."O'Faolain went on to write Almost There, a sequel to her memoir, and My Dream of You, a novel about an Irish travel writer. She announced her diagnosis in mid-April.Fresh Air remembers O'Faolain with an excerpt from a 2001 interview.==================

Some quotes :

She also talks in dept about meaning in life when you're not a mother or a wife in middle-age, I thought it was very worth listening to just to hear anothers' experience

"how can you believe that that would happen and it would solve everything"

"well for one thing when you're middle aged, you have a history that you can never share it isn't there for you to describe it, and so you're already late to the table of passion"

"i would like to forget all that, bec i feel demeaned for secretly longing for it"