I used to envy divorced people.

I had a protracted spinsterhood that lasted into my 40s and towards the end of my 30s I discovered that between the 1960s and 2005 being divorced had gone from being a liability to being preferred. A conversation with a man I’d met through online dating went like this:

“Have you ever been married?” he asked over the phone. We’d liked each other’s profiles and were chatting to see if we wanted to meet in person.

“No,” I said. I was 38.

“Have you ever been engaged?”

“No.”

“Have you ever lived with anyone?”

“No.” I was picking up on a pattern. “Have you?” I asked back.

“Yeah, I had girlfriend and we lived together for a couple of years.”

“Oh. Okay.” Pause. “Well, I — “

“I just kind of prefer to stick to people who have been in a committed relationship,” he said.

“Well, I have been in committed relationships.”

“Yeah, but I mean…it’s not the same.”

What I discovered from this man, and others, was that at a certain point, my never-married status had gone from being a plus to being a big negative. I began envying my divorced single peers. For successful middle-aged dating, the divorcées were more appealing than I was.

Then in 2008 I got married! And in 2014 I got divorced. I’d achieved the dream.

No, being divorced hadn’t really been a goal per se. I’m being more glib than the sadness and grief I went through deserves. I had wanted to stay married and felt devastated when my then-husband told me he was done.

But my service as a wife was no longer needed, so after grieving and establishing my post-divorce household and lifestyle, I looked forward to a new life. A year and a half passed and then I started dating again.

It hasn’t gone well.

Actually, it didn’t start out badly. I first discovered that there were 23-year-olds who wanted to have sex with pudgy, 48-year-old me, so I did that for a while. I also discovered that there were good-looking men in their 30s who wanted to date me, so I did that, too. But as time wore on, I realized that for all the sex that was available to me, these men didn’t have any interest in a long-term, loving relationship.

Eventually I got off dating apps like OKCupid and Bumble that only yielded (for me) young men looking for sex only. In the past year or so I’ve tried dating sites for people over the age of 50. That should do it, right? No young men looking for sex only on OurTime.com!

Unfortunately, what I’ve found on sites like Our Time and Silver Singles is a lot of nothing. I’ve sent men messages and smiles and I’ve responded to their messages and smiles. But most of those messages and smiles were from fake profiles, which is to say scammers who were looking for someone they could hook emotionally until she would send them money. I’ve spent over a year now on those over-age-50 sites and, for all the money they’ve cost, they haven’t yielded a single connection.

I think the problem for the over-age-50 is that any dating app relies on the rightward swipe and we Americans love youth. Gray hair, sagging skin and extra pounds make us think of grandparents, not someone we could fall in love with. Sadly, this is true even of those who are over age 50 ourselves. Having our own gray hair, sagging skin and extra pounds does not mean our mental wiring has changed to find grandpas and grandmas sexually attractive. No dating service that starts with looking at a static image will go well for us because to Americans only youth is photogenic.

Does that leave me alone for the rest of my life? Well, no. It means methods of meeting people that rely on a photo to be swiped on is a terrible idea for me. It’s a terrible idea for anyone in my age group (which is Generation X, by the way). We middle-aged people (yes, we are middle-aged) need other ways to meet.

I come across much better in person than as a two-dimensional image, so from now on I’m simply going to find potential dates as I go about my professional life — which requires lots of networking — and my personal life — which has lots of active socializing. I regularly make friends through the professional organizations I belong to, the clubs I run and other groups I’m in. Sometimes I make new friends just talking to strangers in restaurants or waiting for public transportation.

Sure, I’m on year six of trying re-enter the dating pool, but I’m not in a hurry. In my 30s I felt an urgency to partner up and settle down, but now that I’ve established a perfectly fine life on my own, I figure the relationship will happen when it happens. I go swinging down the street unattached, a free electron, an unmanifested wish. Until I find my next relationship, I get to flirt with the whole world.

12 Dec 2022

Originally published on Medium.

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