I had breakfast this morning with my girlfriend Hedy to celebrate my upcoming forty-eighth birthday.  We sat in a gazebo restaurant on a beach in Maui, surrounded by palm trees and soft tropical air, and all we could talk about was aging and face-lifts.

Hedy qualifies as my plastic surgery expert, having had her eyes and boobs done in her thirties and a full face-lift in her early forties.  She’s fifty-three now and gearing up for her next round of surgery.  After inspecting my face, she said, “If you just get your eyes done now, it’s going to look like you’ve put a brank-new couch on a worn-out carpet.  Wait a few more years until the whole face starts to go and have it done all at once.”  She continued, “You’re at the age where it all still looks good, but one day, and one day soon, you are going to look in the mirror and realize that it’s all gone to hell.”

“Happy birthday to me!” I said, and retreated to my macadamia nut pancakes, wondering if she was right and hoping she was wrong.

It never occurred to me to consider plastic surgery until very recently.  I was one of those women who took their looks for granted.  I assumed I would somehow be exempt from the aging process, wouldn’t care by the time I got there, or would die young.

I was a always secretly a bit contemptuous of women who had cosmetic surgery, thinking them vain and insecure.  It has since come to my attention that whatever I have contempt for, I should just set a place for it at my table, because it’s either already in my life or it’s coming.

When I was a teenager, I had contempt for people who drank and used drugs, girls who suffered from eating disroders, and women who lost all their money in connection with “some man”.  After sixteen years in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia, and having lost all my money in what I call “my spectacular codependent bottom of 2000″ with the help of a gambling addict boyfriend, it has dawned on me that I can use my contempt, which is really my fear, to predict my future – or better yet, to change it.

A few months ago I broke up with a younger man – let’s call him Brad (since it rhymes with cad) – who lives in L.A. and works in the music business.  He was another never-been-married-or-had-a-successful-relationship-forty-one-year-old-man-boy-who-lies-about-his-age from Hollywood.  In retrospect, this should have been all the information I needed to stay away from him – I anted a mate, not just a date – but he was sexy as hell and I had been in a penis-free zone for too long.

Thinking that his time it would be different, I used all my powers of denial to ignore the red flags an charge ahead.  I figured if I moved fast enought, it wouldn’t count as a mistake, like if I eat a chocolate bar fast enough, it won’t have any calories.  My favorite definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results, and this qualified.  Not unlike the movie Groundhog Day, I seem destined to relived the same relationship, over and over, until I’m willing to change my behavior.

My first moment of clarity came during the holiday season, when I was giving Brad a blow job and realized I didn’t know him well enough to know what to get him for Christmas.  I thought this was ironic, but when I told him, he said, “Yes, that is a problem around the holidays, isn’t it?”  My girlfriends, on the other hand, understood.

My next clue should have been when we were making love and he whispered, “Women your age can’t really get pregnant, can they?”

I thought to myself, They shoot assholes, don’t they?  But I was still having enough “fun” to overlook his comment.

The last time I saw him was when he casually mentioned, “I want to marry someone exactly like you, only younger.”  This is not something that I will ever need to hear more than once, so I said, “Good luck with that,” gathered my belongings, and left.

Brad was like an abbreviated version of my love affair with drinking.  At first it was fun, then it was fun with problems, and finally just problems.  I stopped drinking when I was thirty-one, but I’ve been falling into manholes since my twenties.  At least I don’t set up house and furnish it anymore.  I was never a serial dater, but I was a serial mater, so after hooking up with the wrong person, I would either marry him or spend years trying to make it work.  Now I can fall into and climb out of a manhole in about six weeks, tops (I call this expiration dating), and sometimes even walk around one.

Wendy Merrill is the author of Falling Into Manholes, in addition to being a contributing writer for SINGLE WOMAN OF A CERTAIN AGE. You can visit her online at www.fallingintomanholes.com.  Excerpted from the book Single Woman of a Certain Age © 2009 Edited by Jane Ganahl. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.