'You wouldn't deny a dying man, would you?" says the noted academic, who is sitting to my left at dinner.
Dr. Guess, who was in town from New York, had just told me, before he offered his light-hearted proposition, that he is living with cancer and feeling pretty good, all things considered.
"But you're married," I tease.
"I don't have to be tonight," he jokes.
It was all harmless banter, the type of thing adults of a certain age do over a martini and tapas in the deep downtown. (The ol' creep-o-meter, which is finely tuned, didn't even flicker.) And it made me think about what midlife women like about midlife men. Dr. Guess is in his 60s.
That he is married is not good, but the fact that he brandishes his sense of humour rather than his impressive Harvard-this-Oxford-that career is.
Mind you, as a younger woman, I would have probably swooned over his pointy-headed importance, if he had made an effort to advertise it.
We were into reflected glory back then. Most of us wanted our men, and especially possible husbands, to have status, a good education, big dough, height and handsome looks. Family pedigree was also good; something to mention to Mom and Dad when you were thinking about bringing him home for the holidays.
I will never forget a friend of mine saying of the men she was seeing, "I have one who is a lawyer and one who is an investment banker." We were in our 20s.
But now? "He should feel like your favourite pair of sweatpants," says a 57-year-old woman, who married for the first time in middle age. "He has to be comfortable to be around, and reliable."
As Ellen Fein, one of the authors of The Rules series on dating, says: "You don't know who you will fall in love with." But what's the point of aging if you don't develop a few opinions about love, what to look for in a man and what to avoid? It would be like living to 70 and not figuring out how you like your eggs.
"Guys who have to let you know within the first five minutes that they have a Porsche and live in a mansion are boring," says Marlene Hore, a legend in the advertising business who was widowed at 40 and recently remarried. "Who cares at this stage in life? ...
"Money is nice to have but not a must-have. ...
"I think older women are interested in guys who have forgotten who they are. They are not striving to be someone. They have arrived ... so they can be interested in you, which, in turn, makes you interested in them. When you go out for dinner, and spend two or three hours together, you want to be able to talk and laugh and enjoy each other's company."
That women of a certain age are more inclined to "look beyond the obvious," as one fiftysomething put it, means they are forgiving about the ravages of time.
Balding? "You want a man who thinks, 'I am not my hair. I am something deeper than that,' " offers Carolyn, a divorced woman in her 40s. Forget the comb-over. "Better to shave it all off."
The paunch? "If you can't see the belt under the belly, that's a problem," she continues. But otherwise, "Sort of chubby is okay." Women look to older men's appearance more as "a barometer of how much they care about themselves," Carolyn says. "And if they can't look after themselves, then maybe they won't be able to look after another person."
