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,