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."
