We are not, suffice it to say, invisible. We are flesh, and we have needs. In fact, I believe it’s crucial to talk openly and honestly about both the joys and horrors of casual sex in middle age, in the same way I once felt it was important to talk about both the joys and horrors of casual sex in the lives of twentysomethings and war correspondents. The subtitle of my first book was “Adventures in Love and War,” and I meant it. At the same time, I have a strong and I hope understandable desire not to be publicly slut-shamed again. And yet to tell an honest human story without admitting the messy truths of who we are behind closed doors feels both false and willfully evasive.
Eros and Thanatos—love and aggression—are the two opposing forces that drive all of our narrative arcs, but one cannot write openly about the former, as a woman, without triggering the knives of the latter. These slut-shaming knives are wielded, I was both surprised and also not surprised to learn, not by men but rather by other women, many of whom self-identify as feminists.
Why? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself, over the course of these post-adolescent decades, and the obvious answer I’ve been able to come up with is this: One of the more destructive by-products of sexism is that, given the impossible choice between madonna and whore, some women will reject the absurdity of this binary duality by projecting their anger over it onto other women and subconsciously judging them by the same patriarchal standards.
In other words, your basic garden-variety internalized oppression.
But there seemed to be more at play—and social science now backs me up—with the vitriol levied at women by other women. “Women’s participation in slut shaming,” writes sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong, “is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures.” Specifically, Amstrong and her co-authors argue, they are “unconvinced that women would engage so enthusiastically in slut discourse with nothing to gain.”
So what does a woman have to gain by slut-shaming another woman? According to their study, two things: class advantage and status. “High-status women employ slut discourse to assert class advantage, defining their styles of femininity and approaches to sexuality as classy rather than trashy.”
I apply this sociological theory to the slut-shaming I’ve both witnessed and experienced over the course of my life, and, yep. Fits like a dainty white glove.
My conversation with Jonathan, after its rough start, begins to flow with ease. We realize we know people in common. He’s recently relocated to New York after decades in L.A. and waxes rhapsodic over what it means to be able to walk everywhere instead of getting into a car each time you want to visit a friend, the grocery store, a movie theater. I listen to the story of his divorce, which he recites without rancor. This is an unusual and welcome break from the men who mercilessly savage their ex-wives, like the man who also disparaged, over the course of our one hour together, a hotel I’d just said I liked (Third-rate); the last man I’d dated (Poofter); and the restaurant in which I thought we were enjoying a delicious meal (Terrible service).
Jonathan also reveals that he had a postdivorce relationship that just broke up a couple of weeks prior, and he’s still quite raw from it. He speaks glowingly of his kids. He’s courteous to the server. He listens well and doesn’t interrupt.
After coffee and dessert, he asks where I’m heading. The D train stop at Broadway–Lafayette, I tell him. That’s right near his apartment, he says. We should walk there together.
This is the part of the date I always find the most confusing, even at—no, especially at—my age. Is he asking me up to his apartment? Or is he just being polite and offering to walk me to the subway? Do I want to have sex with him, if he asks me upstairs? The answer to this question often depends on my attraction to the man as well as to how many months it’s been since I’ve been touched by anyone. More than three months? Sure, why not? Less than a month, I’m a little pickier.
My most recent app date had been with a tiny but dazzling Italian musician, whom I met on a Friday night at a bar around the corner from my apartment at 10 p.m., an hour when I often do my grocery shopping after my son falls asleep. I’d recently called the local precinct, to ask if it was legal to leave a sleeping eight-year-old in his room while I went out around the corner to buy milk and eggs, and the officer who answered the phone said, “Look, I was raised by a single mother. You do what you gotta do in the hours you gotta do it. Kids these days have cellphones. And he’ll get pissed if he doesn’t have milk in his cereal tomorrow morning.”
After a quick beer, the musician and I made our way to a bench in Inwood Hill Park, across the street from my apartment, where we engaged in what my mother’s generation would call “heavy petting.” Apt, because I have fully become a 1950s teenager, only without the local drive-in, lookout point, or Thunderbird for privacy. Butting up against the limits of public decency, we took the equally teenage risk of tiptoeing into my apartment, sneaking into my room, and making out for another hour behind a locked door before I made him tiptoe back out into the night around midnight, because, to paraphrase the nice cop, Mama’s gotta do what she’s gotta do in the hours she’s gotta do it.
The next night, as I was heating up spaghetti sauce for dinner while my son was busy doing his homework at the kitchen table, the musician’s first name followed by “From Tinder” where his last name should have been flashed across the screen of my iPhone.
“From Tinder” has become a growing family name in my contact list, not to be confused with “From Bumble” or “From Hinge,” like the way Europeans often have last names with a de followed by their region of origin.
I put down my spoon and picked up the phone. The Italian thanked me for a wonderful time. “What are you doing right now?” he said. His accent was thick.
“Stirring tomato sauce and boiling pasta.”
“In honor of me?”
No, in honor of the gods of Whatever’s in the Pantry. “Sure.” I laughed. “In honor of you.”
“So…” He paused. “I have an important question of you.” Of you. I love it when foreigners insert their own grammatical peculiarities into English.
I turned the heat down to simmer, gave the pasta a quick stir. “Okay, shoot. What’s the question?”
He got right to the point. “Are you into threesomes?”
I froze. I was not about to talk dirty while preparing dinner in front of my kid, but I was also curious: I’d never had a threesome. Maybe that would be fun? But how to make my response to his question G-rated and anodyne? “That depends,” I said. “Will the team you’re trying to build for this particular project consist of two men and a woman or two women and a man? The former would probably be the better way to achieve your objectives and goals.”
“Two women and a man?” he said, but in the next breath he was giving me the task of finding us the other woman. “How quickly do you think you can find her? By next week?” Suffice it to say, nothing is less sexy to a mother than being asked to add one more line item to her to-do list: Order more laundry detergent, answer work emails, sign the permission slip, locate succulent for son’s school project, run the bath, walk the dog, take out trash, straighten the toys, and find a willing and sexually available woman for a threesome with the man I just met last night on Tinder? No. No, thank you. I’ll take a pass. Unless she can show up with Tide pods and a cactus.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m a little too busy right now to take on a new project.” I hung up.
“Who was that?” said my son.
“Just this guy I know who needed an extra person on his team.”
“You didn’t want to be on his team?”
“Nah. I would have had to do all the work.”
His new school was really into group projects. He knew all a
bout what it was like to have to pull the weight for the others. “I hate when that happens.”
A few days later, I was sent a reminder text, also while I was cooking dinner: “Before the end of the universe I would love another time in my life to have the privilege to share a bed with two smart and sexually vibrant women. I know it’s a lot to ask to the world. Just sharing with a smart woman. Hope you are doing well.”
Once again, I politely declined his offer to help find another woman for a threesome. He was not asking it to the world. He was asking it of me. I still get the occasional mass email about his performances, but otherwise that was our final communication.
Several celibate weeks passed. How many? Let’s see: There were buds on the trees in the park where the Italian and I made out, so it was early spring. Now, as we approach the screenwriter’s building, it’s hot, nearly summer. Meaning it’s been at least a month or two since anyone but my mirror has seen me unclothed, so I’m leaning toward going upstairs, if it’s offered. Even though this hasn’t exactly been a love connection. But there are other issues to consider. The screenwriter seems deeply sad from his recent breakup. I’m both sad and panicked from my job loss. So the timing of this otherwise semi-promising date is completely off. It’s also late, and I’m tired. My ex is still living in California, and sex after work can add on another $40–$60 to my babysitting costs, plus I can never sleep over, so then the question becomes truly mercenary: Is this man’s touch tonight worth an extra $40 in babysitting or should I save it for lightbulbs?
Yes, lightbulbs. The wiring in my apartment is so old and jerry-rigged, that my lightbulbs—particularly those in the two kitchen ceiling fixtures, the ones with the live wires that frequently shock me—burn out faster than I can replace them. Even the new LED ones, which are supposed to last forever, burn out after only a few weeks. I’m nearly always standing on a ladder after work, replacing at least one of them, or ordering a steady supply of replacements online.
“I’d invite you up, but my daughter’s in the apartment,” says Jonathan.
“Of course, no worries. I have to get home and let the sitter go anyway.”
“Oh, god,” he says with a sympathetic eye roll. “I remember those days.” His children are around the same ages as my older two. “Must be hard trying to date with such a young one.” (Translation: I’m not sure I’m up for dating a woman with such a young kid.)
“Yeah,” I say, but only because the truth is too complicated to explain. Yes, my postmarital dating life would be much easier and less expensive if I hadn’t had a third child nine and eleven years after his siblings. No question. But the everyday exigencies of caring for my little boy; of coming home from work to his guileless hugs, his moon cheeks and stories; of watching him sleep as an antidote to hopelessness: This is my life raft. Our life raft. We may not be able to see the shore, but we bob along together, buoyed by love.
Anyway, that’s that. I don’t have to choose between sex and lightbulbs tonight after all. Maybe sex wasn’t even on the table, who knows? Maybe he took my distracted lack of presence during the date as a lack of interest in general. Maybe he’s physically repulsed by me or simply not attracted. Maybe he believes there must be something wrong with me if I got fired. Maybe my young kid is a nonstarter. It’s so hard to read between the lines when it’s been a quarter century since you’ve had to deconstruct them. I seem to always live in the dark these days, both literally and figuratively.
“Thanks for dinner,” I say. “It was nice talking to a grown-up.” Ugh, what a weird thing to say! It was nice talking to a grown-up? I talk to grown-ups every day at work. Or rather…I did. As of two hours ago. Now what? Jonathan and I will make a few halfhearted attempts to get together again, but the timing will never work out.
“How do you do it?” my friends ask. “How do you keep going on these dates that go nowhere, week after week, without losing your mind?”
“Easy,” I say. “With zero expectations that any of them will go anywhere.” In fact, I explain, to keep my sanity, I’ve begun to treat every date like a journalism assignment. Though my first app date with Gio went unusually well, I’ve since learned that going into any app date hoping love will blossom is like taking a pickaxe to pyrite and expecting gold. The trick is not only to anticipate the fool’s gold but to appreciate the luster and heft of each nugget. Then each date becomes an opportunity to bear witness both to the refraction of someone else’s light and to the weight of their burdens.
How do they weave their own particular narrative? What do they emphasize, and what do they leave out? Are they as forthcoming with their own missteps and failures as they are with their successes, or is every defeat the fault of another? So much can be learned from asking the simplest questions: Where did you grow up? What was your relationship with your parents like and how is it now? Do you have siblings? Are you close to them? If you could snap your fingers right now and do anything else or be living anywhere else, what and where would that be? What’s keeping you from making that change and why?
My married friends like to help me swipe, which is fine by me, as I find that part of dating as tedious and soul-sucking as they find it titillating, but otherwise I refuse to swipe in public. It feels like a private act, meant for bathroom breaks or while spacing out on the couch after a child’s bedtime. One time, bored, I started swiping while in line for coffee, but when I happened to catch the eyes of the woman behind me, staring at my screen, it felt akin to having been caught masturbating in public.
I think of my hour or so of nightly swiping before falling asleep as a job but with different goals: love, not money; companionship, not collegiality; relaxation, not industriousness. Swipe! I pretend I’m a casting agent, searching the slush pile. Swipe! A college admissions officer, filling a class. Swipe! An overpaid TV host, deciding who gets the golden buzzer. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe! Love’s in there, somewhere, I think, watching the dominoes falling off the screen one by one.
I’m not looking for nor do I believe in the concept of a bashert, which is the word Jews use to describe that one perfect soul mate, out there in the ether, just waiting for me to find him and only him. But I do believe in the ability of dating apps to facilitate the search for a decent romantic partner who can one day grow into a mate for my soul, and I believe in the existence of multiple decent romantic partners for each of us seeking co-pilots, which is what I want: a best friend who smells good, has acceptable hygiene, makes my heart thump when I look at him, likes to have sex, loves me with the same combination of ferocity and gentleness as I love him, and treats me, as I treat him, with reverence, kindness, and empathy.
Rare, I know, and perhaps a MacGuffin in the still-unfolding narrative of my life, but I have to keep believing romantic love is possible. That this millstone of loneliness might one day be lifted. Even my ridiculously long computer password, during this period, bears the deadweight of my conditional tense concerns followed by my age: “WhatifLovewerereal?49.”
An American “epidemic of loneliness,” it’s being called, in research papers, the press, even on an official U.S. government website. Two in five Americans are unhappy with the relationships they do have. One in five Americans feels lonely and socially isolated. Loneliness, these researchers warn, is as lethal as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day; can lead to suicide, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias; messes with our immune and cardiovascular systems, and more. Loneliness, in other words, is killing us.
So every night, like a bedtime prayer, I open my apps and swipe.
TWENTY-THREE
Durkheim
JUNE–OCTOBER 2015
One night, I swipe right on (let’s call him) Durkheim, a ruggedly handsome, fifty-something sociology professor from coastal New Hampshire who’s a dead ringer for Steve McQueen. “It’s a match!” the screen tells me as the covalent bond of our encircled faces draws together. I feel that dopamine rush familiar to every
retiree feeding quarters into a Vegas slot machine who suddenly sees a row of three sevens and hears the crash of metal below. I text a photo of Durkheim to my friend Soman, who’s gay, for his expert opinion. “Hot,” he writes back, although he’s a little concerned that my potential paramour has a close-up of himself surfing, which means he had to go to the trouble to make this photo happen, so like how does that work and what does that say about him? I ignore Soman’s misgivings. If I had a face and body like that and could surf, I’d probably go to the trouble of attaching a GoPro to my surfboard, too.
I start a chat with Durkheim. He’s in New York helping his mother take care of his stepfather, who’s being treated for cancer at Sloan Kettering. “No way,” says Soman. “An actual good Samaritan?”
“Way,” I say.
“Okay, okay, go for it. What do I know?”
Our first date goes well: a 7 a.m. Sunday stroll through Inwood forest with my dog followed by takeout coffee and blueberry muffins on a park bench overlooking C Rock: the Bronx high cliff onto which Columbia students have painted a giant C, and off of which adolescents jump into the Harlem River and adulthood. We discuss his failed marriage. His regret over not having kids. The sociology of suicide, his lifelong area of interest. Because my son always sleeps late on the weekends, and I always take the dog on a long walk before he wakes up, I can relax into this conversation and really listen.
“I’m grateful you were game to get up so early,” I say.
“I figured I’d try to make it as easy on you as possible. Must be hard dating as a single mother.”
I laugh. “What, you mean other women on Tinder aren’t inviting you to 7 a.m. dog walks?”
He laughs. “What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asks, which never happens at the end of a first date. The unwritten Tinder rule seems to be, in my limited experience, to play it cool and make your date wait a few days for a follow-up text.
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