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Q:
What's the difference between a Cougar & Leopard?
A:
A Leopard is a Cougar with age spots!
Advice to midlife man-eaters: cool it
They were drinking coffee when she struck. A woman of a certain age
promptly plunked herself down at the table with two men in their late 50s.
Within minutes - it started with an innocent remark about a tattoo on her
finger - she dropped her jeans to show the men another tattoo, this one on her
waxed pubis. "I'm the queen of hearts," she purred as she indicated
the two-inch crown positioned just above her, um, vault. "This was in
broad daylight," reports one of the men, aghast.
Maybe Jack Canfield should write another soppy bestseller: Chicken Soup
for the Soul of the Midlife Single Woman. He could instruct them in the
art of Zen dating. Their aggression may be the result of confidence in
themselves, their bodies and sexual appetite. But while many men like such
bravura, is it always attractive?
At a recent gathering of midlife women, one divorcee regaled her friends
with a tale of unsatisfying sex. Post-coital, the new lovers got to talking
about conjugating verbs in English. (Don't ask. Maybe they were both
nonsmokers.) He was French, and she was trying to increase his understanding
of English. "Let's conjugate the verb to come," she instructed from
her pillow. "I come. I came. I will come. I will have come,"
she said, adding how he could get her to the future imperfect.
He followed instructions, apparently. But stories about how many men
respond to the aggression of older women should wrinkle a few brows - if
they're not too Botoxed - and cause a recalibration of dating behaviour.
"Many men find the behaviour really offensive and a turn-off," says
Judith Sills, a practising psychotherapist for 30 years who interviewed many
single, older men and women for her latest book, Getting Naked Again:
Dating, Romance, Sex, and Love When You've Been Divorced, Widowed, Dumped, or
Distracted.
Heightened aggression is understandable. Midlife men are sitting at the
dating feast of their lives, and can banquet-surf. They have a choice of women
who are older, the same age or younger. (This is a fact of midlife, which all
the older men I talked to happily acknowledged.) That, in turn, makes many
older single women more competitive. "We are competing with
thirtysomethings!" they wail during a discussion about fitness, clothes
and deliberations about possible plastic surgery.
What is harder to acknowledge is that the assertiveness many single midlife
women exude in the dating trenches is often fuelled by insecurities rather
than confidence. If some younger women are anxious to couple up by their 30s,
driven by their ticking biological clocks, some women in their 40s and 50s
become anxious about finding a mate because of a perceived best-before date.
They figure they have to bag a man while they still can.
"It's easier at 47 than at 60," worried one divorced and
unattached woman in her 40s.
Some older single women fear being alone as they age. "I just don't
want to be on my own," a fiftysomething woman said to partly explain her
decision to marry a second time. Dr. Sills also came across many single
midlife women who expressed financial insecurity. "It's the 'I'm afraid
I'll be a bag lady and I need to find some man to help pay my bills'
anxiety," she explains.
For divorced parents whose children have grown up and left the nest, the
domestic emptiness can exacerbate their feelings of loneliness and stoke their
desire to find a mate. "I was totally focused on raising my children for
the last seven years," explains one divorced woman in her late 40s.
"They took all my energy. And now I want to find a man."
Angst that they may never get a man makes some women eager to seal the deal
once they've hooked one. At least that's how one male reader in his early 50s
described the behaviour of some of the women his age whom he has dated. They
professed love for him within a matter of months, which he found off-putting.
"How can they love someone so fast? It came off as desperation," he
scoffed.
But who hasn't blurted the love word in the early months of romance? Maybe
this man was simply feeling overwhelmed with all the midlife women who were
throwing themselves at him, a fact he reported in a manner that can only be
described as mock embarrassment.
"And I like older women," he added with a shrug, as though it
were a badge of honour. "All my male friends are urging me to go younger,
but I don't want to. I just wish older women were not so aggressive."
Of course, he could also be suffering from the dating ailment known as
Delusional Projection - that tendency both single women and men have to think
that every person who simply strikes up a conversation is making a pass.
As Dr. Sills points out, "Single women always get a bad rap no matter
what age they are. Men often think women in their 30s are desperate for
babies, when many times they aren't. And they think of all older women as
desperate cougars when, in reality, many of them aren't."
But Dr. Sills does acknowledge that many midlife divorced women do
overwhelm a potential suitor even though they think of themselves as seasoned
daters. "Women are anxious about not getting hurt again, so they become
interrogators. By the second date, they are asking what his relationship to
his ex is like, and with his kids. They pride themselves on ruling people out.
But men find it a turn-off. It's predictable, and it's not very engaging
socially or sexually."
Her advice is simple: Keep an open mind. Be in the moment. Build social
networks. Don't hunt for The One. Rather, embrace The Many.
"There are lots of roles for men in a woman's life," she
explains. "A guy available as a friend, to be your escort, is a
treasure," she says.
A "dating dry spell" for older women is not uncommon because of
the challenges in finding partners, she says. But rather than being a reason
for despair, it can be a welcome opportunity to get on with developing their
own interests - many of which they may have neglectedwhile building their
careers or raising families.
What many boomer women need to learn is a feminist principle that may have
escaped them the first time they were on the dating market, in the seventies,
she says: Men are not the fix-all solution.
Which is how many potential suitors like it.
It may be deeply counterintuitive in a culture that promulgates the
importance of being in a committed relationship, but women of a certain age
have the chance to discover that men can be delicious icing in their lives.
And that they can bake the cake on their own.
- 2008 October 16 GLOBE
& MAIL
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