To make a love story you need a couple of young people but to reflect on the nature of love you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.
I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.