Group therapy in a blog.
The Age Thing, Again
My friends and I often find ourselves talking about “the age thing” – this can include men’s propensity to seek out younger women (often excluding women in their own age group), how older women dating younger men are generally frowned on and assigned an animal nickname (welcome to “Cougartown”), how an age difference can either matter or not matter in choosing someone to date, and the degree to which online dating – filtering primarily by age – creates unnecessary and unimportant hurdles in front of someone who could be great.
For instance, this “Vows” couple who almost didn’t make it, because of her list, and because of “the age thing.” They went out twice, had two great dates, and then she called it off – not because she didn’t like him or have fun with him, but because he was nine years older. True, part of that was because she was feeling her youth and her newness in a big city with lots of (perceived potential) – at that point, to her, 26/35 was a huge difference.
Don’t cry for him, though – he became a “serial dater” in the ultimate serial dater city, and along the way, stayed in touch with the lady in question, meeting for drinks and listening to her kvetch about other guys. Eventually, the stars aligned, something shifted, the bride-to-be got older and wiser, and the couple dated, got engaged and got married.
The bride said she could not believe she wasted more than 10 years without him.  “I look at him now and he’s the hottest guy on the planet,†she said.
What lesson should we learn from this couple?
That the right guy at the wrong time is the wrong guy?
That attraction sometimes takes 10 years to develop? (For women – if he hadn’t been attracted from the beginning, I don’t think we’d be reading this story…)
That we shouldn’t cling so tightly to our “lists”?
That age ain’t nothin’ but a number? Or that age unfairly assigns a set of stereotypes to a person who may not remotely fit them?
This entry was posted by Esther Kustanowitz on February 7, 2010 at 10:50 pm, and is filed under Friends With Benefits, Funny/Sad or Sad/Funny, Hitched/Ditched, Online Dating, The Friend Zone, The Single Life. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.
I strongly dislike stories like these. It gives romantic suckers like me the hope that, someday, some girl I felt an amazing connection with in the past will pop back into my life and become my bride- and that’s the last thing I need!
Opinions about Obama aside, hope can break your heart and drive you insane…
Excellent point, Darren – can’t live in the past.
Stories like these give false hope to the romantic, John Hughes-ending-loving teenagers in all of us. And that’s just the “non-age” side of this story…
I have to ask the question, though… What kind of guy keeps in touch with a girl and his feelings for her alive after she kicked him to the curb 10 years ago because he was too old? When a girl ignores fantastic chemistry and real “meeting of the minds” (so to speak) in terms of what we both want and can provide because of some arbitrary point, it sends up a huge red flag in my mind and leaves me glad that I’m no longer pursuing her.
Methinks that maybe he’s a torch holder and she just decided to settle.
Oh dear, here we go again. It’s open market. There are fewer men and more women, so it’s men’s market. Men get to choose someone younger, healthier, nicer, more popular and otherwise higher ranked than themselves. It’s been going on for couple thousand years now. Remember Boaz and Ruth? Itzhak and Rivka? and many more examples, less famous, more recent. Personally, I am not attracted to older men, I even prefer slightly younger. My market value doesn’t match my needs. So, that leaves me single. So be it, that’s my choice: I prefer to be single rather than widowed or chained to a unhealthy man who (maybe unwillingly) limits my life. Majority of women, however, pretend age doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But other things marriage has to offer weigh more for her. To each their own as long as people are honest with themselves and others.
I’m just struck dumb here. Ten years? It took them 10 *Years* to get together? And mainly because she just ‘couldn’t see it’, and wanted to be a CEO. And it is the Hollywood ending because in any other scenario other than in NYC he’d have been long married. They might have been married years ago, had a passel of kids already and be talking about schools for them by now. But no. It had to play out to where both were essentially otherwise ‘romantically exhausted’ and only then ‘came to their senses’. Ridiculously predictable too!
This does not give me more hope, it depresses me deeply! These people knew ‘exactly’ what they wanted, and actually went out and achieved it. Both high flyers as is typical for the ‘Style pages’. Exemplars if you will. And still, in their romantic lives they were more or less Clueless about how to make the right connection with someone they wanted to marry. Until they came around to a solution that’s as noted above, as Old as the Bible. Look Further, give up your silly notions of yes, what’s strictly ‘acceptable’ & not.
Of course mostly? This has to do with mere Numbers. Age (within some rational limits, OK?). Height. Income. And yet this is seemingly impossible for all too many people to actually do this until they are well past their peak reproductive careers. Then and only then does it seem that some ‘sense’ creeps into the discussion.
So Desperation. Evidently we need to inculcate still more desperation earlier, as nothing else seemingly will work, right? Geez, How depressing is that? We need new drugs or better logic & common sense use among the highly educated. Better get working on the compounds & drug developments, firstly. Common sense known to prior generations is obviously immune from acting here & now. Drugs. That’s the ticket… Cheers & Good Luck, ‘VJ’
10 years? are you joking? sounds like she just got tired of bad dates and decided to go with the backup plan that seems to be very common: if someone isn’t married by the time they’re a certain age, they’ll marry one of their friends or settle for someone they’re not really all that interested in, just for the sake of not being the last single standing. what does that accomplish? a whole lotta nothing.
these damn lists are the reason why so many Jews are still single…face it, we can’t all be/meet/earn as much as doctors or lawyers or Hollywood movie directors. there has to be some flexibility.
as for age: i don’t see anything wrong with a 9-year age difference. as long as people can relate to one another, then it shouldn’t matter.
I am not sure stories like this can give false hope don;t you think.