Meanwhile, he learned that I’m a journalist and did the hard sell on pitching me an article about his company. I deflected several times—I told him I don’t write about business; I attempted to change the subject entirely by asking what he does for fun—but he didn’t take the hint and spent the remaining three minutes badgering me about writing an article about his company. Desperate, I was about to tell him that I’m not a journalist after all—I was kidding! Ha, ha!—actually, I’m an accountant. My job has nothing to do with writing or water or writing about water. . . . But I didn’t have a chance to say it, because, fortunately, I heard the ding.
Guy #6 sat down. His name was Robert. He was a widower. He was smart. He was sweet. He was a lawyer. He probably was extremely handsome thirty years ago. He’d never been to a speed dating event before. He said—“in the interest of full disclosure”—that he’s actually sixty, but there are no speed dating events for people his age. I hadn’t thought about that—what do people do when they’re single past 50 or 55? What if I’m still single? How will I meet men then?
Earlier, during my breaks, I’d looked around and noticed that the two older women—the ones who looked close to 50—were hanging on Robert’s every word. Robert wasn’t making a lot of eye contact with them. He seemed to be going through the motions. But these women were flirting. They were way into him. They were so . . . eager. And they didn’t have a shot. That could be me in ten years, I thought. Then I realized—that is me. I’m at the same event, meeting the same men as these women. This is my life now, too.
In the few minutes that I chatted with Robert, I found him to be interesting and kind. He admitted that coming here tonight wasn’t his idea, but his daughter, who is 34, put him up to it. I thought: His daughter is 34! I asked if his daughter had ever tried a speed dating event. “No, she’s married,” he laughed. “In fact, I just became a grandfather again!”
“Again?” I said, my voice cracking as I tried not to burst into tears at the table. “She has two kids?”
“No, my son has one, too,” Robert replied. “He’s got a two-year-old.” I was speechless. This man’s kids were married with kids. My son was his grandson’s age. I stared at the table and Robert broke the silence with, “So, what about you? Have you ever been married?” No, I thought. And at this rate, I never will be. I recovered enough to say, “Not yet,” and then, in what seemed like an eternity later, the ding sounded.
Since I’d already met all six men, I sat alone for the last two rounds and filled out my scorecard. I checked “no” by every box.
THE POSTMORTEM
That was it—the event was over. The cute event coordinator had us give ourselves a round of applause (Congratulations! You suffered through this night successfully!) and asked us to turn in our scorecards. As the younger women collected their purses, the coordinator noticed our shell-shocked expressions. “Try it again another time,” he said to us. “Maybe it will be different?” he added unconvincingly.
On the way out, I passed the bar area of the restaurant. Stylish, smiling young men and women were talking and milling about. Nobody seemed to be over 30.
Driving home, I added up the costs of the blown evening. Event tab: 25 bucks. Babysitter tab: 40 bucks. Parking: 8 bucks. Time spent showering, shaving legs, blow-drying hair, applying makeup, and coordinating outfit: 1.5 hours. Round-trip travel time in rush-hour traffic: 1 hour. Lost evening that could have been spent with my beloved son: priceless.
I didn’t blame the event sponsor for the fiasco. Instead, I blamed myself. On some level, I realized that it was simply the consequence of my having made bad dating decisions when I was younger. I knew that people met through speed dating all the time. I even knew someone who went to a 25-to-35 event when she was 29 and met her husband, who was 32, there. She’d been to three events, and at each one, she told me, there were an equal number of men and women. Some of the guys were duds, but most were relatively enjoyable to talk to. They didn’t have a lot of baggage or sob stories. If they lived in crappy apartments, they had promising careers. They didn’t remind her of her friends’ fathers. Later, I asked a 40-year-old single friend about her speed dating experience. Was mine unusual?
“Not at all,” she told me. “Sounds pretty typical for a forties to fifties event.” She said that when she was 38 and 39, she’d gone to a couple of 30-to-40 events, and while the guys were far more appealing—she’d marked “yes” next to several—they were only interested in the women in their early thirties.
I’d always heard that dating gets harder the older you get, but I’d never really taken it seriously before. I didn’t consider that one decision—say, passing up a good guy because “something was missing”—could change the course of my life forever. Back in my twenties and early thirties, I hadn’t yet spoken to women in their forties and fifties who were wracked with regret at having broken up with a wonderfully nice guy for silly reasons, and who now live, as a 48-year-old designer who used to always have boyfriends put it, “a manless existence that consists of an all-female social life.”
I thought about my 30-year-old friend Julia who had broken up with Greg, the nonprofit guy, and was now dating Adam, the charming surgeon, but couldn’t decide between the two. I wanted to call her up and say that she should get her priorities straight and figure out which compromises she’s willing to make, because if she passes up both of these guys now, they won’t be at the 40- to 50-year-old speed dating event in ten years. But she might be.
Instead, I called up Rachel Greenwald, a dating expert who specializes in coaching single women over 35, to see what advice she might have for me.
I mean, I was 41, but I wasn’t dead. I needed to hear something hopeful.
PART TWO
From Fantasy to Reality
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
—Sigmund Freud
5
Older, and Wanting to Be Wiser
Rachel Greenwald is what you might call a sensible optimist. She uses a lot of exclamation marks in e-mail messages, and I could hear them in her enthusiastic voice when I called her up in Denver. She wants people to find love—it’s her passion. But if she can sound absurdly hard-core in her bestselling first book, Find a Husband After 35: Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School—“Except for something illegal or immoral, would you do anything to find a husband?”—it’s only because she knows the reality: The dating world changes once you’re out of your twenties.
Of course, a few years ago Newsweek reported that their article from the 1980s had been wrong—it wasn’t true that women over 40 had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married. Instead, their chance for marriage was as high as 40 percent. That was supposed to be reassuring, but think about it: Less than half of women over 40 will ever marry. Besides, some of these women won’t get married in time to have children, and they’re more likely to marry someone who’s divorced with kids and has the difficulties of another family to deal with.
Greenwald told me that the first thing I need to remember is that I’m not dating in a vacuum. “You might be great, but there are so many great women out there just like you at the same time that there are fewer available men. There’s a reverse power curve you have to take into account as you get older.”
She cited a Census figure in her book—28 million single women over 35 versus 18 million men. When I looked deeper into the Census figures for singles 30 to 44 years old, I found that there were 107 single men for every 100 single women, but for 45- to 65-year-olds, there are only 72 single men for every 100 single women. If those numbers sound daunting enough, Greenwald said that out in the world, there are even fewer prospects for women my age. Why? Because
many men want to (and can) marry younger women, and because men big on commitment and starting a family usually aren’t the ones who are still available after 35. So women in their mid-thirties probably will end up dating more guys with more complicated pasts and more issues—just like they’ll have by then.
“I could take two fantastic women at age twenty-five,” Greenwald said. “These women are exactly the same in terms of appeal. Now, put them through two different experiences over the next ten years—one gets married and one stays single—then line them up side-by-side at age thirty-five and you’ve got two totally different women. The one who had a happy ten-year marriage thinks the world is good and the woman who was out in the singles world for ten years is cynical and pessimistic—and that’s what it’s like for men, too. By the time you put one guy through a successful marriage and another through the mill of dating and failed relationships, they’re different kinds of guys. That’s what’s different about dating older people. They tend to be more jaded. They’re not as hopeful and appealing as younger single people tend to be.”
I told Greenwald that I didn’t consider these factors when I was ten years younger and waiting for just the right guy to pop into my life. It seemed reasonable to think that the longer I searched, the better the guy I’d end up with. But it’s faulty logic, she said: The longer you wait, the less likely you are to find someone better than you’ve already met.
THE CHECKLIST OF A 25-YEAR-OLD
It’s not that the available older men are all “losers”—as many dating women might complain. It’s just that they don’t look anything like the person you’ve imagined being with since you were a teenager. If you’d met this person when he was 27, you’d have known him when he was much closer to your mental image of the man you thought you’d marry. But that same guy at 45—even if he looks middle-aged and has an ex-wife and two kids and has experienced disappointment in life—can still be great spouse. The key, Greenwald said, is to realize that “realistic” isn’t a dirty word.
“The goal is to marry someone you truly love, who is going to treat you really well and make you happy,” Greenwald told me, “but nothing I just said has anything to do with a guy’s age, what his hairline is—all the things on a checklist of a twenty-five-year-old. If you’re forty years old and you restrict your mental image of Mr. Right, you’re going to be disappointed.”
Greenwald said that for a lot of women, their search criteria go like this: “ ‘I’m forty and I want to have a baby, and I’m only interested in someone five foot ten and above, and under age forty-five because I’m really active and I look young. I’m Jewish, so he has to be Jewish. I’d prefer someone who has no kids, but if he has kids, I’d prefer that they’re older or don’t live with him,’ and they go on and on and on!”
I was glad that Greenwald and I were on the phone because I could feel my cheeks turning bright red: guilty as charged. I mean, what’s wrong with wanting those things? Would she tell an older single guy, Hey, you know all those women you weren’t attracted to or interested in back in your twenties? Well, guess what—they’re still available and some are divorced and you should be more open-minded?
“Not at all!” Greenwald insisted. “I’m not saying that you should end up with an ugly, boring guy, but some women search so narrowly they can’t even find a guy to go on a date with! I’m not at all saying I want women to settle. You definitely have to have real chemistry with someone, but how can you tell if you’ll have chemistry if you won’t even give a guy a chance if he’s the wrong age or height? Maybe he’s so compassionate and hilarious and has other qualities that don’t meet the eye.”
A big problem, Greenwald explained, is that we have the same standards at 35 that we did at 25, but the things we wanted at 25 aren’t as important to our lives at age 35. We should be looking at things like patience and stability instead of instant butterflies.
In fact, we should be looking for that at 25, so we don’t marry the guy at 25 and realize at 35 that he doesn’t have qualities that are essential in a good marriage.
“I’d give the same advice to a twenty-five-year-old that I’m giving you,” she said. “But the twenty-five-year-olds don’t want to listen.”
SELFLESSNESS AND HUMILITY
The advice Greenwald gives is simple: Knock off anything as a deal-breaker that’s “objective” (age, height, where he went to college, what type of job he has, how much hair he has, whether he has kids or an ex-wife) and focus on what’s “subjective” (maturity, kindness, sense of humor, sensitivity, ability to commit).
I told her that was easy for her to say—after all, she got married seventeen years ago, when she was 28. How would she feel now, if she were still single in her forties, and someone told her not to pay attention to these objective criteria?
Greenwald laughed at this, but only because she’d been there. She said she almost didn’t meet her husband because she’d also been too hung up on objective criteria. Back in business school, she’d spoken to her husband on the phone in a professional context and enjoyed those conversations, but once she looked up his photo in a directory (and wasn’t impressed), she ruled him out as a romantic prospect. It was only on meeting him at a party and getting to know him that she started to find him cute—and more.
“When I was looking and single,” she said, “I wanted everything! I wanted tall, good-looking, smart, funny. I was so specific, I even wanted curly hair.” And while she got some (but not all) of what she wanted, she’s quick to point out that none of that has to do with her happiness in her marriage.
“When I was dating, two qualities that never occurred to me as important but that turned out to be critical in our marriage were selflessness and humility,” she explained. “A ton of times on a daily basis in marriage, you have to decide whether to maximize your happiness or the other person’s, and my husband has proved so often to maximize my happiness. In courtship, we mistake romance for selflessness, but it’s not at all the same thing. Romantic gestures like sending flowers aren’t the same thing as waking up in the middle of the night and taking care of the baby so I can sleep.”
“Also,” she continued, “humility is key—the ability to say it doesn’t really matter who’s right or wrong, and it’s okay to have different opinions about things. So I ask people, where on your list do you rank selflessness and humility when you’re rejecting a guy based on his age or height?”
In fact, John Gottman, a well-known marriage researcher at the University of Washington and author of the bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, has shown that he can predict marital success with 91 percent accuracy by looking at basic qualities like compromise, tolerance, and communication style.
Greenwald isn’t discounting the desires many of us have. She’s saying, instead, that while we’d like “everything” in a guy, we should reexamine our standards—and early on—if we want to find the right partner before it becomes increasingly harder to find him.
When she meets women over 35 and takes their romantic histories, she told me, it’s often some variation on I was in this failed relationship for three years, another for five years. Or, I kept getting back with my ex-boyfriend, instead of making myself available to meet someone more appropriate. Or, I knew after six months or a year that it wasn’t going anywhere, but I stayed anyway, hoping things would change. What should have changed was the way these women picked their partners.
According to Greenwald, they squandered their peak dating years.
“The men they’ve been attracted to have generally offered the exact opposite of what they actually wanted in the long run—stability, responsibility, compassion, groundedness, maturity, the desire for kids,” she said. “You have to remember that you don’t have time to waste on a guy just because you’re so infatuated with him.”
Uh-oh. Guilty as charged—again. I thought about the boyfriend who fawned all over me most of the time, but th
en would suddenly withdraw after offering some lame version of “I got scared.” I stayed with him anyway—for two and a half years. There were also a couple of wonderfully exciting and seemingly romantic guys who turned out to be more in love with themselves than with me. When I was younger, I kept thinking that I could let things unfold organically and not bother initiating conversations about our futures, but Greenwald said it’s just as important to be proactive early on, before you get into a real time crunch.
“Women who want to get married and have families need to think about what really matters—and make their dating choices consistent with their words—before they end up single in their mid-thirties,” she told me. “I’m not trying to be alarmist. It’s just a shame to see people come to me with these realizations when it’s so much harder than it might have been had they had a different perspective ten years earlier. Say you’re thirty-three, and you’ve been dating for eleven years since college and you want to start a family. Well, I can still set you up with a great forty-year-old who wants to start a family. But at thirty-five, it’s more of a challenge. A half shelf-life for a woman is about thirty-five. The real shelf life is forty. Once you’re forty and dating online, no guy who wants to have kids is willing to even meet you. Divorced guys who already have kids will meet a forty-year-old, but many of them have had vasectomies.”
If Greenwald had told me this when I was 30, I would have thought she was exaggerating—or, at the very least, that I would be the exception to the way things generally went for older women. Even now, I often thought, I’m still cute, or I’m young at heart, or I don’t look my age. But everything she was telling me had turned out to be true. Of all my friends, single or married, few knew any single guys my age at all, and of the one or two that they did know, neither was willing to date a woman over 40.
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