Dating in your 40s is a whole other kettle of fish, discovered Sarah Catherall, when her marriage ended just shy of her 40th birthday. Navigating the world of dating apps for the first time was an eye-opening experience, that’s for sure…
Welcome to Midlife Musings with award-winning journalist Sarah Catherall. Sarah has spent more than 30 years writing for publications such as New Zealand Listener, The Post, The Spinoff, Vanity Fair and the BBC. She’s also the author of How to Break Up Well: Surviving and Thriving After Separation. Sarah is currently embracing her midlife years and in this instalment she writes about the trying to stay sane amid the anti-ageing movement.
I met my ex-husband the traditional way: I was in the kitchen at a party, when he came over and chatted me up. It was the mid-nineties when it was perfectly appropriate to approach a stranger in a bar, or at a party, or to flirt with someone at work and end up married – which was how quite a few of the journalist couples who worked together in my newsroom hooked up.
When my marriage ended a few months before my 40th birthday, nothing prepared me for the horror of online dating. I hadn’t dated for 15 years and the only man I had flirted with or taken my clothes off for was my husband.
But the narrative running through my life was this: I was a Gen X female who had been groomed to marry or to be partnered. My marriage had ended, and I wasn’t complete without a man in my life.
On a wintry night, I created a profile – a nice pic, not too flattering, and I fibbed about my age. I knocked a few years off and began swiping. DramaFreeDude came up. Hell, he didn’t look “drama-free’’. He was 64 – 20 years older than I was at the time – his eyebrows were grey and wiry, and he looked like he needed to be searching for a rest home, not trying to go on a date with me. I swiped left on DramaFreeDude and kept looking.
I took a big deep breath, and decided this was my second chance, and I could either have a bit of fun, or try to find a new relationship. It was also a chance to find my “dream man’’, who was going to be chilled, cute and either a surfer or a musician, ideally both.
After a few bad dates, the first man I spent time with arrived at my house (the kids were at their dad’s) with a van with a mattress in the back. Yes, he did surf, and he was a few years younger than me. I don’t know if he also had a home, but he brought flowers he seemed to have picked from the roadside. He had incredible blue sparkly eyes which pulled me in.
We took our clothes off, but our bodies felt awkward together, and out of sync. He was childless; I had stretch marks from childbirth and my breasts were tiny from months of breast feeding three babies in six years. It hadn’t mattered that I showed this body to my husband, because I had been growing and nuturing our children.
Then I dated the sad dads. Their eyes welled up as they talked about their exes and their kids, how much they missed Hugo and Frankie. I turned into a quasi-therapist, giving them advice. They were so used to being told what to do by a wife or a partner that they couldn’t even organize where to go for a date.
Initially, I thought it would be quite cute to partner up with someone with children, and we could live happily ever after, Brady Bunch style. But the sad dads I dated put me off. I also realised didn’t want to complicate my life any more by worrying about more children when I had three of my own.
In my mid-forties, I flipped the narrative. I had three daughters, my own home, and my career. I actually didn’t need a man, unless it was for occasional sex, or connection. Did I really need to prove myself by partnering up in mid-life? Did I really want to enter a relationship and bring another man into my daughters’ lives?
I literally put my shoulders back, deleted the apps, and went on a man ban. I was single for more than six months, without a mere thought of a man, when I met my Mr Chapter 2. Our encounter was one of those weird coincidences when we became Facebook friends and then I kept seeing him around Wellington. He felt familiar. I met him and he felt like my person, and we’ve recently celebrated nine years together.
What was different about him, and about us, is that we might not have liked each other on a dating app. What we share most of all is common values, and it’s quite hard to suss those out on Bumble or Hinge. I also love his smell – something I couldn’t have picked from a screen.
I wish I could wave a magic wand over my GFs who are single in mid-life and would love to meet a special person. I don’t think there is one right way, but there’s power in being single if you have everything else you want, and you’ll only compromise or give up some of that wonderful independence if he/she/they are really worth it. I had too much time on the dating apps feeling like something was missing.
Our lives can now be literally carved into four quarters; in the 50-75 quarter, it’s a time when women usually don’t have young children pulling at them, and we can embrace this as our time, like we did in our twenties.
In my book on relationship break-ups, I interviewed a very cool 70-year-old woman who was trying to meet someone on Bumble. She rolled her eyes about the men she was dating. She had lost money through previous break-ups but had managed to keep her house. She wasn’t going to give up her independence for some old geezer. She said something which really stuck: “I don’t want to be a nurse or a purse’’.
