Maturity

The Art of Letting Go & Letting Down

Posted on by egoandorgasm

Sloan: One thing that I’ve had to face since I began dating again 6 months ago is the fact that not everyone I like is going to like me back and not everyone that likes me is someone I’m going to be excited to see again. When you’re in a long-term relationship, you fantasize about the rich and wonderful dating and sex lives that people not coupled up are having. After a few years of coupledom, you forget about all the nonsense and drama and rudeness and flakiness that single people have to deal with on a pretty regular basis. The dating scene can be great and it can be brutal. Often, it’s both concurrently.

This summer, I was dumped three times by guys I liked quite a bit. I also had to tell several men that I wasn’t interested in that I wouldn’t be seeing them again. I won’t even list out all the guys who have ghosted, or all the mutual fade-outs, or all the missed connections that have been sandwiched in between. It’s been a rough go of it and I’ve learned a lot – both about myself and about what I’m really looking for in a relationship.

Analysis:

How do we go about getting out of intimate situations in a graceful way, even when we are hurt or when we hurt someone else?

Sloan: Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the wake of all these romances is the art of letting someone go or of letting someone down. They’re not mutually exclusive and often overlap, but I tend to see them as separate entities. I think one involves more regret and hurt and the other more guilt and hesitation.

Letting Go

The art of letting someone go involves walking away from someone you’d rather not have to say goodbye to at all. Either you like this person, or you love this person, or you are in lust with the person. And either they just aren’t feeling you too, or they are toxic, or they are just not bringing the same level of enthusiasm to the table as you are. Whatever it is, you know you need to let them go. Sometimes this is forced upon us when someone else breaks it off. Sometimes we need to walk away first in order to avoid a bigger disaster down the road. Either way, it’s never easy to let someone you like go. It’s even harder to do it gracefully.

  1. Remind yourself that you can’t force someone to be into you or to be ready for a relationship.
  2. Really spend some time thinking about the problems and red flags here. I’m sure this person is great, but what about the things that indicated this wasn’t the right person for you? What were you ignoring?
  3. Keep your dignity. Don’t beg. Don’t try to argue your case. See #1 for why not.
  4. Distract yourself. Go out with friends. Go out with other guys. Try to stop thinking about this person. Do not sporgulate.

Letting Down

The art of letting someone down involves walking away from someone that you know you just aren’t feeling. For whatever reason, you’re not into this person. He might be great – and you may have an urge to keep him around “just in case” you fall for him. You probably won’t. If the chemistry isn’t there, it isn’t likely to develop. And it’s unfair to keep someone around in case you want to get serious with them later. No one wants to be someone’s safety pick. You don’t, right?

  1. If you’ve gone out with this person less than three times, it’s fine to let them down via text. (Sloan: I like to use some variance of “I’m just not ready to date someone yet, but I had a great time with you.” It’s hard to to argue with and people tend not to take this personally. And yes, I lie when it’s socially responsible.)
  2. If you’ve gone out with this person multiple times, or had sex with them on multiple occasions, it’s probably best to call or do this in person. And yes, this means putting on your big girl pants. Ghosting or fading out isn’t really the solution. (Viv: This is really true.  The urge to just disappear is strong, and I have to confess that I have done it more than once in the last few months and had it done to me.  But when I have been strong enough to look someone in the face or explain myself verbally over the phone, it has always gone well, and I have left the situation feeling fairly confident that the end result is mutual respect.)
  3. GOLDEN RULE: Put yourself in their shoes. Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want done to you. Try to be as nice about this as possible.
  4. THE CAMPGROUND RULE: Dan Savage is right. Try to leave the campground the way you found it. Do no damage on your way out. Pick up your baggage when you leave.

Smart, Single, and Aging: Why Do We Obsess About The Way We Look?

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“Nothing ages worse than a beautiful woman’s ego.” – 80s-90s supermodel Paulina Porizkova

Sloan: When my last boyfriend broke up with me and moved out, I was about to have a birthday. I’m still in my early 40s, but suddenly I felt OLD. Like purple dress old. Like support stockings old. Like saggy, dimpled butt old.

I started hitting the pavement – running at least 5 times a week for 5 miles – and doing ballet. I did lunges while waiting for the elevator and down my hallway. I did squats at various times throughout the day. Because MY BUTT. Duh.

Post-breakup, I looked at myself in full-length mirrors the way copyeditors look at pages of text…closely, scrutinizing each error. My butt was too dimpled. My thighs were saggy. My stomach was a small pooch. I am over 40, so of course I don’t look like I did at 20. But I wanted to. No, it’s worse than that – I felt I *needed* to – because I was about to go back onto the dating scene.

Men are visual creatures. This is both common folk knowledge and research-backed fact. They look first and find the inner beauty second. (I would argue that a lot, if not most, women do the same thing, perhaps with differently weighted values attached to inner versus outer attributes.) My guy friends and former boyfriends are always trying to tell me that what’s special about me is not my looks. So why don’t I believe them? Why do I mourn the transition of my face and body? Why do I worry so much about aging?

Maybe it’s because “You’re so hot” is one of the things uttered the most from the men I’ve dated. My looks have always been a driver of my success with the opposite sex. So now that I’m single and aging, I am naturally worried that I’ll be at a disadvantage on the dating scene. I’m worried that I’m slowly becoming invisible. The real trouble is that I’ve always played the beauty card. It’s part of my identity and how I exist in the world. I don’t know how to play the dating game without it. But I also know I’m going to have to figure out how to start relying on things other than my beauty to attract men. My “hot” days are numbered.

Viv:  I am younger than you, Sloan, but I feel ya.  Big time.  I am no longer an awkward looking 25 year old.  Now I am an awkward looking 34 year old.  I have lines on my face, crows feet, and dry hair.  Dry hair!  I am in the best shape of my life, post divorce (I run and do ab work as though it were my job), but this only seems to keep the dreaded “thickening” at bay.  All the exercise does not reverse the aging process.  I wear more makeup now than I ever have before (to look like I am not wearing any makeup, of course), and I get my nails done in a lazy attempt to look “put together.”  What does that even mean?

I still have men tell me that I am “hot” all the time, but this doesn’t phase me and I don’t seek it out.  Truth be told, I want someone to tell me that I am beautiful.  Now that I am older and wiser, hotness doesn’t impress me anymore.  Hotness is a dime a dozen.  If I keep up my efforts I know I will remain hot.  But the ephemeral quality of beauty is something else again.  I think that I have had it at some points in my life, but I can’t say if I have it now, and I don’t really know how it happens.

Analysis:

First, let’s just get the research out the way: Looks really do matter.

They matter in terms of career, or how much you will make and what type of job you’ll get (see this and this).

And in terms of relationships, men do, on average, care about looks more than women. Just ask UCLA researchers:

“Because for men, the attractiveness of their wives is part of the deal,” said Karney. “For women, that’s not part of the deal. The deal that women get isn’t being with an attractive man. It’s being with a protective man, or a wealthy man, or an ambitious man, or even a sensitive man. So they didn’t care as much about the appearance of their husbands.”

Apparently, we also tend to couple up based on our looks. Models tend to date models. The rest of us sort ourselves into some approximation of rank by beauty. And, unsurprisingly, looks matter the most to those of us who have them. People who are considered less attractive tend to rank partners based on attributes other than looks.

So are we just shallow when we worry about aging? Do looks really matter that much?

Yes and no. Yes and no. On some level, looks matter because we need to be attracted to our partners. And we need them to be attracted to us. (Sloan: I’ve been in relationships in which I wasn’t physically attracted to my partner and a few months or a year in, we basically stopped having sex altogether.) That being said, looks aren’t the only thing that matters. And we all know that. (Sloan: I’ve also been in relationships with men who were gorgeous, but hollow or warped or broken. I think I stayed with them because their looks hid their terrible personalities for a bit. But ultimately, it would never work out with someone if I could only look at them and not talk to them or laugh with them.  Viv: Yes, I once dated a man sheerly for his beauty.  He was vain, selfish, and insecure.  But I liked how other women would be so envious of us.  That thrill lasted a couple weeks, and then I got over it.)

Sloan: I’m vain, not shallow. I think there’s an order of magnitude between these things. I’m smart enough to know that my beauty – such as it is – is part of my privilege. I am aware that I am attractive to men and I’ve leaned on that fact both in my career and in dating life. So now that my looks are fading – slowly, but surely – I am worried that I will have to learn a different way of relating to men. Right now, I enjoy a lot of attention. In the future, I expect I’ll enjoy less of it. And I might have to work to get dates. And that scares the shit out of me.

My best male friend asked me the other day when I was going to stop defining myself by my looks and I looked him dead in the face and replied: “Probably never.” And I meant it. Beauty is a curse as much as a blessing. It takes a lot of work to redefine yourself as you age. And to not to overdo it at the dermatologist’s office.

Viv!! Please do not let me go crazy on the Botox and fillers!!!

Viv: Not to worry, I won’t let you get space face.  I myself may never go the Botox route, but I will surely keep up my vanity and note the signs of aging as they spread over my body.  But I don’t think aging will take away my beauty.  I really don’t.  If I am beautiful (and this isn’t something I can judge for myself because I tend to only see the things that bother me when I look in the mirror), it is because I am comfortable in my skin (and dry hair), and because I have confidence when it comes to engaging with others.  And the older I get, the more interesting I look.  My face tells a story that some people are drawn to.  This is a quality that I expect will only strengthen in the coming years.  I also realize that not everyone can see this beauty and I am OK with that.  I still have an amazing butt.

Dating After Divorce

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Divorce.  Ugh.  Oof.  Sigh.  This experience comes in many shapes, sizes, and bittersweet flavors.  It can be positive and empowering or devastating and crippling, or more likely some confusing combination of those feelings.  No one has the same experience of divorce, and there is no magic solution for recovery in terms of jump starting or easing into your romantic life and moving on.  And yet the urge to connect with another person often rears its head at some point in the process of separation and disentanglement from a life partner.  Or the urge to have sex with someone who is not your spouse.  Or the urge to pay attention to something beyond your pain.  Whatever the motivation, we have found that dating after divorce is not at all the same as dating before we were married.

Viv: I was married for 2.5 years before I separated from my husband, let’s call him Harvey, though we were together for nearly 5 years.  All told it was a brief relationship in the scheme of marriages.  And yet the experience was still the most painful and challenging of my adult life.  In many ways I am still in recovery.  My official divorce is still pending and it is likely that I will be grappling with issues of trust for some time to come.  I have been separated for 10 months, and I have not seen Harvey in all of that time.

When I first met Harvey I was in transition.  I was in my late 20’s, fresh out of graduate school and about to embark on an adventure across the country in a new city at a new institution.  The world was my oyster, though if I am honest, I still harbored feelings for my recent ex-boyfriend (another 5 year relationship), and I was apprehensive about what the future would hold for my new life.  Harvey was my 8th date on a 10 date challenge I was doing for fun with my friends.  I didn’t think too much of him when we met.  He was handsome, but also a bit squat, hairy, and he seemed more nervous than most of the men I was dating at that time.  I would later learn that he suffered from anxiety and crippling insecurity, but back then I was puzzled by his nervousness.  He seemed to compensate for it by being overly enthusiastic about me, about my life, about my family, and about my friends.  He gushed about every aspect of my existence.  Despite my initial annoyance with this behavior I was flattered, and I let his desire for me sweep me away.  We began a cross-country relationship.  I discovered his adorable sense of humor and his deep seeded need for stability.  This seemed to match my own goofy sense of humor and love for family, friends, and community.  We fell in love, and I forgot about my initial reservations.

Harvey and I had a healthy relationship for 3 years, including our first year of marriage.  This is in large part because we lived on opposite coasts for most of this time, and when you have a lot of space from your partner you relish the time when you do see them.  We thrived in a way.  We did our best work.  Harvey’s commercial career in tech exploded.  I published in a top journal.  But after a while, despite my efforts, my nonprofit career stagnated.  I quit my full-time gig, which seemed to hold no real promise of change, in order to travel back to the other coast to move in with Harvey as man and wife (something he insisted upon), to support his rapidly growing business venture, and to begin to think seriously about starting a family.  What I didn’t quite get (It seemed weirder that I wasn’t living with my husband) was that in the process of moving in with him I became dramatically underemployed and dependent.  I was too naive to realize that this was a dangerous choice.

Our world rapidly fell apart after I moved in for good.  I was voraciously independent so I never felt comfortable with our arrangement, and Harvey did not have the capacity or maturity to respect someone who was circumstantially dependent on him.  We began to fight severely and frequently.  He stopped supporting my goals, he ignored my contributions to the household, and when I was lucky enough to win a prestigious research grant to temporarily work overseas, he was irate about it.  He felt that I wasn’t doing enough to support his stressful career choices and that I would essentially be abandoning him.  I left for the research anyway (after cutting the time I would spend abroad in half to try and accommodate him) in order to hold on to my career dreams.  He began to spend a great deal of his time with a younger female friend of the family (someone I introduced him to and who attended our wedding).  By the time I came home for a visit after about 6 weeks away they had already admitted that they had feelings for one another.  The marriage never recovered (despite counseling), and Harvey left me soon after my research season ended.  Yes, he left me.  I was too stubborn to quit and I was determined that I would not be the one to say the words.  I moved out after they were finally said, and a few months later I found out what I had already suspected: he and our friend were in a relationship.  He officially filed for divorce last month.

The feeling that you are losing the person you love (or in my case gaining the realisation that the person you loved and the person in front of you now are two very different people) is viscerally like having your internal organs ripped out one by one and smashed on the cement combined with the numbing sensation that you are watching all of this gore and violence from a great distance.  Your whole world is shattered.  You implode.  I also lost his family, my own family was hurt and confused, and my community of friends was thrown into turmoil.  The dust is still settling.  I have never wept so much in my life.  It was the kind of grief that consumes your whole body as when someone you love dies.  I gained new wrinkles and gray hairs.  In truth, I may never look the same again.  I have been forever marked.  It was a brutal initiation into adulthood and the unpredictable vicissitudes of life.

Sloan: I want to pipe in here to say that I’ve been divorced twice, but didn’t experience what Viv did. In both cases, I was in an open marriage and was dating at the time I divorced, so my experience is of a different, but equally complicated, sort. That being said, I am 5 months out of a relationship with someone. We lived together and I loved him desperately. When he walked out on me, I felt exactly as Viv describes so beautifully above – I was devastated and broken.

Analysis:

How will you know when you are ready to date again after your marriage ends and why is it healthy to do so?

As we mentioned, there is no formula for moving on from divorce or the end of any serious attachment relationship.  Each person has different needs, fears, and expectations.  The worst thing you can do is leapfrog from one bad relationship into another, or use another person as a security blanket to compensate for your loss.  That said, if you are in a healthy mental state, you are ready to move on, and you are wise about your choices, you can gain a lot of perspective from practice dating.

Practice dating is simple: You go meet someone for a beer or coffee, you chat with them, you flirt, you ask questions.  The point is to reflect on your own reactions to this other person’s mannerisms, behavior, opinions, and attitudes.  After the date you take time to assess a number of factors.  What annoys you about this person? What reminds you of your ex? What do you like about the person and why? Where are your points of vulnerability and anger? What are the things you find you most have in common with another person?  What are your own behavioral responses to the other person and why are you having them? How does it feel to be out on a date? In essence, practice dating means seeing a number of people while constantly reflecting on the experience, learning what your trigger points and needs are, and figuring out how to move forward via trial and error.

Sloan: Many people will weigh in on whether or not you *should* be dating after a bad breakup. I am of the opinion that those people are talking about themselves, not you. There is no magic number of weeks, months, or years. Every person is different.

For Viv and I, it has been important to practice date for the moment we’re ready to really be in something again. For others, they need solitude. Either way, dating again is tricky, but I for one am back on the horse.  (In a future post, we’ll explore trust issues and what it’s like to have sex again after a long-term relationship.)

Viv: Remember, there is always a bright side.  I don’t have to be committed to a man who doesn’t respect me, my dreams that I have tirelessly pursued for years, or the community I have worked so hard to build in the world.  I don’t have to be married to his insecurities.  I get to date again, and feel beautiful and sexy in spite of, or even because of, my new wisdom and new wrinkles.  I moved out of our apartment, and 3 months later (thanks in large part to the support of my incredible family, wonderful friends, and amazing therapist) I was on Tinder, swiping for fun.  A couple weeks after that I met a jolly man I could joke with, and we went out a few times and slept together on one warm Saturday night.  I also started dating 2 other men about that same time.  I only told one of them about the separation (he had gone through a divorce years ago so it felt safe).  Now I date all the time without commitment (something I never would have done prior to this marriage, when I was essentially a serial monogamist).  I experience real joy.  I can’t handle a committed relationship yet, but I am practicing for the time when I am ready to be vulnerable and welcome someone into my life.  In the meantime, there is laughter, learning, and sex.  I value these fleeting moments of companionship.

I may never see Harvey in person again.  That is sad considering how close we once were, but he earned his absence from my life.  The good news is that I landed another (much better) full-time position in a new city back on the other side of the country, and I am moving in weeks.  My independence has been restored.  My senses of identity and of my relation to the rest of the world are stronger than ever.  I’m back.  Brace yourselves.

Tindering Over 30: Not Actually a Dating Apocalypse

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A recent article in Vanity Fair by Nancy Jo Sales (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating) describes the dating life of 20 somethings around the country. According to this piece, young women are perpetually glued to their phones, feverishly Tindering during dinner, while having drinks, and throughout sorority meetings.   They are addicted to “hook-up culture”, and mobile dating apps allow for an endless stream of “fuckboys” to come over and ravish them and/or exploit them. They have to play the perfect text game (read not act too interested), and they have to have sex with men they meet online (who themselves are sleeping with upwards of 100 women a year) and pretend they want nothing more. If they “catch feelings” for someone, it is perceived as a sign of weakness. All this is referred to in the article as our society’s current “dating apocalypse.”

The world depicted in this article sounds truly awful. However, this world is not what we are currently experiencing in our own app fueled dating lives. Instead of a dating apocalypse, we both think of our dating lives as healthy, interesting, and even, dare we say it? Fun.

Viv: I love Tinder. There. I said it. My warm fuzzy feelings for the app stem from the fact that it (and a few others) saved me from having a sexless Spring while my soon to be ex husband and I worked out the terms of our divorce (still pending at the time of this writing). I was able to meet truly nice people, have a few beers and a few laughs, and occasionally have sex without attachment (though never on the first date). None of these men had to know I was recently separated or recovering from the greatest emotional upheaval of my adult life. Without Tinder I would have been stuck with trying to date friends of friends, who would have known about my separation, or I would have to be spending an egregious amount of time in bars, looking attractive and available. This doesn’t work well for me, as I would vastly prefer to spend my free time with my friends while wearing grandma chic, and I have been known to kill men with the evil eye if they interrupt our conversations in order to chat us up.

I also love Tinder for the people I meet there that I don’t end up sleeping with or even kissing. I have had great one-off dates full of lively conversation, good food (I always offer to split the bill if we get to food- no “tinder food stamps” here), great drinks, and even some emotional intimacy when I am in the mood. At one point I met up with a man for cocktails who was also recently divorced. He looked handsome in his Tinder photos, and he was just as handsome in reality. We talked about his ex, his kids, and the realities of dating when you have children (I do not have children, so I was fascinated by this aspect of his life). This man held my hands, touched my hair, told me I was beautiful, and thanked me for a great experience. I never saw him again after we parted ways at the door of the bar, and I think that made the evening we had even more significant. It was just the kind of thing I needed that day.

Sloan: I am ambivalent about Tinder, if I’m honest. I used it for a bit and then turned it off because I was tired of the barrage of messages from the guys I had swiped right on. But, that being said, I don’t think it’s part of a “dating apocalypse” any more than I think Facebook is the end of civilization as we know it. I think that, as a culture, we love, love, love to bemoan the passage of the “good, old days” of everything that has been impacted by technology – and that includes love and romance and sex. Certainly Tinder and OKCupid and Ashley Madison (let’s not forget that gem) have changed the game, but they haven’t reinvented it.

I had a few dates off of Tinder and I’ve actually made a few friends (without benefits). I sexted with a hot, young pilot I met online and I’ll probably never repeat it even though I had fun doing it (I have a “try everything once” motto). I’ve had sex with Tinder guys a few times, too, and don’t regret a single second of it. Like Viv, I tend not to hook up on the first date and I’ve never met a guy off of Tinder (or any other dating site) that had an issue with that. I think that maybe our experience is different because we are more experienced game players. Or “playettes”, if you like (shout out to Blackstreet).

In sum, I tend to use OKCupid more than Tinder. But if I needed a fun night out without strings? Yeah, Tinder would be my go-to app. And I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Tinder is like the paprika of my dating life; it’s an interesting flavor, but I wouldn’t want to have it with every meal or overload on it.

Analysis:

Why is our experience so different from the women depicted in this article?

The obvious answer is that we are no longer in our 20’s. As 30- and 40-something women, we know we don’t have to sleep with someone to get them to like us, we don’t pay much attention to texting “rules” (though we certainly do sporgulate over men we think we like), and we aren’t attracted to fuckboys, even though we do sleep with men without commitment. We enjoy the affirmation, thin though it may be, that apps like Tinder can provide, but we don’t count our conquests or talk dirty to people we have never met (Viv: this is not strictly true. I have totally sexted with strangers on Tinder, but I have never ever gone on to meet those sextees in real life). With age comes maturity (for some of us) and a lessening (slightly) of the hormonal urge to fuck our brains out all the time. We are not looking for husbands on Tinder, and we are ultimately in control.

The men we match with on these sites are also older (though Sloan likes ‘em young!), and this means that by and large they are not crude walking dildos (and when they are we swipe left). We get that they probably would like to sleep with us sooner rather than later, should all go well with the meet and greets, but we don’t get the sense that we are a knotch in anyone’s belt. Before we sleep with someone we have to have the reasonable expectation that they will also want to see us again, but that is not at all the same thing as wanting to be their partner. We tend to pick men that seem to get this distinction (though we have been wrong on occasion). In other words, we don’t go for men who seem to be overtly suffering from “pussy affluenza”. (Sloan: I tend to date mostly 20-something men and I get at least 3-5 great dates out of them before we have explosive sex, girls. So it’s not necessarily as simple as hit it and quit it….)

Lastly, we don’t Tinder all the time. Ok ok, we swipe around a few times a day, though we can go for long periods (Days! Weeks! Months!) without opening the app at all. We would never swipe during dinner (unless of course we wanted to let our dinner companions swipe for us to gain some variety out of our match options), and we generally frown on swiping in public places. We do not need the world at large to know we are Tindering because we enjoy (and our careers rely on) the illusion of gravitas.

Can we just say the words “pussy affluenza” one more time?

The Demi Moore Effect: Why 20-something males want to date 40-something females

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Sloan: About a month after my second husband and I decided to get a divorce, a 22-year-old former NYU student asked me out. He had found me on OKCupid and messaged me. Despite his age, I found myself attracted to him. I was 40 at the time and I felt weird about going out with him, but I said yes.

We went to The Comedy Cellar (where we saw Louis CK – a highlight of my dating career). We went to my favorite bar. We went to watch a game. He was polite, handsome, funny. I took him home and discovered that I had forgotten what a 20-something guy is like in bed. In effect, athletic. Their bodies just work without them worrying about it. They’re in shape. They’re enthusiastic. After a few dates, he found a girl his own age that he liked and we called it off. I had a great time with him.

In essence, I broke the seal. After this guy, I kept dating 20-something men. In fact, I developed a taste for 20-something men. Heck, I lived with one for nearly two years in a serious relationship. (And, just for the record, age was not the factor that broke us up. More on that in a future post.)

When I’m out with a younger guy, sometimes I still get self-conscious when I see people my own age looking at us. There’s some judgment there, often, or envy. I can’t tell which one, since they are so often mixed up with each other. But I’m comfortable dating much younger men. Especially during those time periods – like right after my divorce – when I didn’t want to get into anything serious. There is rarely anything “serious” that comes out of a 40-something/20-something pairing.

But it’s not just about sex either, folks. It really, really isn’t. Most of younger men I’ve dated are smart and interesting and they are often bored by women their own age. They want stimulating conversation. They want a woman who isn’t going to freak out if they don’t text her back immediately. They want a girlfriend who isn’t hustling them down the aisle. They want someone confident enough in herself that she can toss her clothes off, rip their clothes off, and ask for exactly what she wants. I’m not saying that all 20-something women are the opposite of this, but it’s a lot harder to be this type of woman when you’re younger. I was a bundle of insecurities in my 20s. Now I’m not. I’m fun and I know what I want. That’s a huge turn-on for a 20-something guy.

Lest you think this is a freak effect, I get asked out primarily by 27-year-olds. That’s the average age of the men who message me on OKCupid. I’m still hot, so I’m sure that is part of it. But they are responding to the PhD as well. I think that there has been a societal shift in our cultural acceptance of older women/younger men relationships. I think it started when we collectively pondered the Demi Moore-Ashton Kutcher marriage. Demi Moore (and Madonna – let’s not forget the queen) did a lot of trailblazing here to normalize this age difference. And, quite frankly, I love her for it.

Analysis:

Why is age an issue? 

I’m going to start my exploration of this question with another question: Why did we coin the term “cougar” to label women who dared to date younger men? There have been many articles on why this term is offensive and what it might indicate about our culture at large (primarily that we are frightened of sexually aggressive women). I hate the term and I instinctively recoil whenever it is applied to me.

But why should I care? Does my own dislike of the label indicate that I, too, have a problem with the age difference?

As a scientist and researcher, I’m trained to look at the history of the phenomenon I’m studying. And the reverse age gap has a much shorter existence than the older man/younger woman. The older man/younger woman relationship makes us uncomfortable because it highlights the power differential between men and women and reflects a time when females held little sway over the path of their own lives. For centuries, women’s lives were dictated by their marriages. And it made a lot of sense to marry an older, established (read – wealthier) man if you were a young woman.

So the younger man/older woman relationship muddies those waters and makes us rethink our assumptions. There’s the argument that women are finally “getting theirs” by dating younger. But I’m not so sure that’s true and I’m absolutely sure that’s not the whole story. The power dynamic between younger men and older women isn’t necessarily the same (again, unless we are talking about the mega-rich woman like Madonna who may be dating a much more socially disadvantaged youth). I don’t support the men I date (in fact, they usually still pay for everything) and we’re fairly equally matched in everything apart from life experience.

When I was in a relationship with someone who was 27 (when I was 40), I worried that I would get too old for him. That he’d want to have children. That he’d eventually want to be with someone his own age (and his new girlfriend is his own age). But gradually, I became comfortable with the dynamic and the age difference often didn’t matter at all. Sure, he didn’t get my cultural references and hadn’t heard many of the songs I loved. But we could talk deeply about politics, religion, art, life. I sometimes forgot that he was 13 years younger than me.

We’re maybe a decade into this new couple dynamic and I think it’s too early to tell what it means or how it will work out. But new research suggests that slightly older women in relationships with younger men are happier overall. The couples report higher satisfaction with their relationship dynamic and share equal responsibilities. That sounds good to me.

Viv: I am just going to pipe up briefly to say, “All hail to you, Sloan!”  But now that I have said that, I have to admit that as a 34 year old woman I am currently repulsed by the idea of dating a 20-something man.  I have all my dating apps set to search for men in a range from 30 to 40, and I am thinking of bumping the minimum up to 32.  This is clearly because my soon to be ex husband was (is) very immature and I am still in recovery from being close to someone who didn’t (doesn’t) have the capacity to make grown up decisions.  Perhaps my feelings will change as I get farther away from this experience?