Dating bad: a midlife woman’s lament
An unwashed poet covered in cat hair, a mummy’s boy… why is dating in midlife so hard?
I love bad dates. I’ve been on so many in my life, but never more so than in the past 10 years since my husband and I split, and every one of them was bad after its own fashion. I never once did internet dating of any kind. I was unwilling to put in the time and couldn’t steel myself for the ways of the Wild West. The tales I heard! No, I was determined to meet a friend of friends. But even so, some dates were just so awful, you could only laugh.
I think of the unwashed, unpublished poet covered in cat hair. I’m not even sure it was a date, but when two middle-aged single people agree to meet, alone, the air about them is invariably freighted with possibility. God knows how or why we chose a blinking burger bar. Without saying anything he made me feel, somehow, that ordering food would be uncool. I thought that was a bit rich considering, with his paunch, he didn’t quite have the look of the starving artist he supposed himself to be. He spoke boastfully about all the women he was close to, the implication being that he was having sex with some or all of them. We each had an infantilising milkshake, so I guess it can only have been a date in the loosest sense. When the bill came he declared that we would split it.
I am glad I experienced the bad dates — life’s rich tapestry and all that — but thank God they are done with, at long bloody last, now that I’ve been in a happy relationship for several months. Still can’t quite believe it. No one can afford to be smug, and I hope I never will be after my grindingly hard decade of platitudes, false starts, disappointments, mixed messages, combusted hopes, humiliations, ghosting and the rest. Finally, I look back and can enjoy the fact that it’s all behind me — for good, with any luck. Still, I wouldn’t have changed the struggles and horrors, because thinking about them now makes me appreciate the present.
The date before the poet had been with a peculiar pedant who had suffered traumas at boarding school and never married. He lived in unromantic squalor in suburbia. Our first “date” — again, never acknowledged as such — was in a pub. He kept his bicycle clips on and talked at admirable length about his mother, who was so miraculous that no woman could live up to her wonders. Bicycle Clips was a crashing misogynist, with his mother being the only acceptable woman — although, at some level, he hated her too.
I find the ghosts of other, “better” women haunt many a middle-aged date. Mothers loom large in the minds of bachelors. Dead wives take on a mythical quality in the memories of widowers. Ex-wives often become creatures upon whom years of damage and pent-up rage are foisted, and some of that rage can be spat onto you.
I own that I have the ghosts of “better” men, too, whom I have loved and lost. Post-divorce, or after the death of a spouse, there is pain, vulnerability, regret and fear — as well as comparisons — with which all older daters have to contend. I felt less robust than when I was younger, in some ways, but at the same time, having learnt a bit more about life (and men), more cautious and fussy. Old and wise enough to no longer accept crumbs. An uneasy combination.
There is so much to factor into late love’s equation. Geography is a big one — living far apart and settled in respective communities. Work commitments. The responsibility of caring for ageing parents. Roots and entrenchment are arguably stronger at 50 than at 20; character traits are more often than not set in aspic. Older people are less malleable; resentful of compromise; less free.
A year ago, a young man in his 30s contacted me out of the blue having read one of my articles and asked me for a drink. He said he had rather fallen for the idea of me. Mug that I am, I was faintly flattered. I met up with him in a bar for an hour. He was an absurd person, a throbbing snob, with a ludicrous voice and the sartorial choices of a man in a period drama. But he was complimentary. Other than from family and girlfriends, compliments are, to a middle-aged woman, a rare commodity. We clutch them to our bosoms even if they are patent bullshit. The older daters were too busy eulogising about past — or current — lovers to think up compliments for me. The young fogey told me over and over again that I was lovely.
The wilderness can be very grinding and send one towards bad choices — I met him a second and third time and slept with him. It was good, briefly, to feel someone else’s beating heart, but his politics road-killed the sex. I don’t want to be judgmental, but I can be, alas. I couldn’t fancy a man who voted differently from me. So that reduces the pool of available men by a further 50 per cent.
Even more significant, though, are the sensibilities of children and the practicalities of dating when a single parent. I think of the witching-hour walks of shame up to my bedroom, having paid the babysitter; the whispering so as not to wake the children; the early alarm calls so the latest lover might make himself scarce before early stirrings and the school run. None of these considerations applied when I was dating in my 20s.
Why did I go on a second date with Bicycle Clips? Well, he asked me. When you’ve been on your own for a while, you do sometimes just go with it, out of a certain boredom, or loneliness perhaps. And most people, after all, have a good side — him included. So I went, despite the fact I was never going to be able to live up to his mother. In my case, anthropological curiosity played a part, too. Every date, however grim, is a story.
The story of this man was that he asked me to a tapas bar. He could only eat the spinach and chickpeas because he was allergic to everything else, down to the paper napkins. The bill came and he said we would go Dutch. I do remember thinking that, just once, it would feel thrilling to be asked out to a decent restaurant and for the date to offer to pay the full whack (and I’d do the same next time). After all, my mother always taught me only to order the least expensive thing on the menu, and I don’t drink alcohol, so I’m going to be the cheapest date known to man.
He kissed me by a wall outside, all spinach and chickpea teeth, after our allergy- and entertainment-free supper. We were mutually indifferent towards one another. But it was a freezing night and, sometimes, people who’ve long been on their own want at least to try to feel alive. Every other second I was thinking, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. I landed, like a fly, purely haphazardly, on yes. I was shivering and, fed up with the prospect of another inert hot water bottle, asked him if he wanted to come home with me. He was nervous or apathetic or both, so it wasn’t the greatest of carnal encounters. But I believe both of us appreciated lying in bed together; for once sensing the warmth of another person, however mismatched. It was a one-off, but it’s still always a pleasure to bump into him in the street.
Bicycle Clips was unusual in as much as he was my age. What I found was that middle-aged men weren’t interested on the whole. Certainly, this is reflected online. Friends who use dating apps always say that men of 55 put 40 as their upper age limit for women they wish to meet, but the fact is they would really rather find a 30-year-old. I know of a man of 56 who is in a relationship with a woman — girl! — of 20. He complains that she wants babies and is surprised when his friends roll their eyes at his naivety. Another man of 60, going through his fourth divorce, is sleeping with women in their 20s but is bored by them. The company he wants to keep, those he wants to have conversations with, are women of his own generation, but he doesn’t find them attractive.
I never even thought about finding anyone who wasn’t roughly my own age. But as the years passed, perplexingly it was only ever young men who showed a real interest in me. Middle-aged ones toyed with the idea, met me for a drink or supper, but their interest soon petered out. Young men, on the other hand, and counterintuitively, could be relied upon. At first I thought it was a fluke — as well as weird — when a sweet man in his 30s hit on me. But then it kept happening and I wondered if it was a thing: today’s Millennials liking older women more than ever. My friends encouraged me to have “fun”, and I did. But the “fun” was limited by the implicit lack of any future, little common ground and, above all else, a certain dissonance when it came to humour. I was flattered and they gave me a spring in my step, but I always held out for a man of my own age.
Then, last summer, I met, for about 23 seconds at a festival, a friend of one of my best friends. Being middle-aged, he and I are both half deaf when there’s loud music, so we barely spoke to each other. Later, he told me he hadn’t even caught my name. My friend quizzed me afterwards. I said, “Nah, he’s a country mouse and I am a town mouse. That’s never going to work.”
Some months later, when he and I met again, my best friend was properly cross with me for showing a little (not much) resistance — out of fear, surprise, caution, self-preservation. Her exasperation was precisely the kind of tough love only a real friend goes in for, and it shook me to my senses. Part of my hesitation was sheer disbelief that, after 10 tough years, someone had appeared at the right place and right time, who was properly good, kind, clever, funny, talented, straightforward, emotionally intelligent and mature, blah, blah, blah — ie, exactly the sort of person I had hoped to meet all along. I had come to believe such men didn’t exist or were all taken.
For it is all about timing and luck. I feel incredibly lucky. And a little bit of that luck is that he can’t be doing with going Dutch either, and his politics align with mine. It works brilliantly and it is enormously satisfying for having occurred offline — because I know for a fact that he would never have gone online and, if he had, no dating app’s simplistic algorithms would have matched us in a million years.
The Times