Here’s a new way to make some money that specifically eliminates sex from the deal (though who could stop you if both were interested?): RentaFriend.com It has a little bit of yick factor, in that people exchange money for what is usually done for free—the services friends do for each other. I guess I get itchy whenever money enters the equation, though I guess it always does, at some level or antoher. What do you think?
Popular rent a friend website allows people to pay for friendship; it’s created an internet buzz
‘Net Buzz ExaminerMarci Stone
RentAFriend.com allows people to rent friends from the US and Canada, and the site has created an internet buzz Monday morning. A friend can be rented to go to a movie, restaurant, a party, to teach you something, or show you around town, or just hang out. You enter your zip code and you can see profiles of friends available for rent in your area. In order to book that friend you must sign up on the website, and pay a small membership fee, and then you can contact the potential friends.
The site states that they are strictly a platonic friends website, and that they are not a dating website, nor are they an escort service.
A friend can be used for a variety of activities including: having a workout partner, someone to give you personal advice, go to a sporting event, or they can teach you a new language.
Many of the friends on RentAFriend.com are about $10 an hour, some are more. But most are willing to negotiate their fee depending on the activity. Once you become a member, you can contact the friend directly to speak about your plans.
If you are wondering why Internet dating hasn’t put matchmakers out of business, here’s why.
Matchmakers thriving despite rise of dating Web sites
Turned off by Internet dating sites that offer a vast selection but take a lot of time, singles are spending bigger bucks for more service that leaves the date-picking to a matchmaker.
By Susan Carpenter
What would you pay to meet the love of your life? Twenty dollars a month for an Internet dating site that lets you wade knee-deep into the dating pool and swim with millions of other singles? Or $1,000-plus for a personalized matchmaker who will do the wading, and weeding, for you?
Over the last few years, a surprising number of singles have been choosing the latter, despite the declining economy. Turned off by Internet dating sites that offer a vast selection but take a lot of time, they’re spending bigger bucks for more service that leaves the date-picking to someone else.
“Matchmaking should have been dead by now,” said Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch, a Web site that’s been tracking Internet dating of all kinds since 2004.
Instead, the opposite has happened, he said. Matchmakers not only have survived but are thriving, having been aided and legitimized by the entity that was supposed to have killed them off — the Internet.
Like social networking, which had many dating industry experts inaccurately predicting the demise of paid Internet dating sites, Internet dating hasn’t killed matchmaking, but fed it. In fact, the three go hand in hand, leading relationship-minded singles to ever higher levels of paid service.
Though social networking sites such as Facebook may bring people together and do it for free, there’s no guarantee that those brought-together people are available and looking for a relationship. And though Internet dating sites such as Yahoo Personals do a better job of bringing together singles who are motivated to get together because they are paying to find dates, they don’t always do a good job of sorting out the serious from the players, or even to help individuals select people who are truly good for them.
Personalized matchmakers promise to do just that. Of course, they also charge a higher price — anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000, depending on the exclusivity of the service, the number of matches they’ve said they’ll provide and how willing they are to go the extra mile.
“You’re the therapist, the mother, the best friend, the sister, the nonsexual girlfriend. You have to be everything,” said Patti Stanger, star of the Bravo reality TV series “The Millionaire Matchmaker” and proprietor of the L.A.-based Millionaire’s Club matchmaking service.
“It’s not good enough to say, ‘Here’s a nice girl.’ You get them a girl, they’ll sleep with that girl, cheat on the girl. Then I’ve got to get that girl back. I have to go in and do an intervention and be on call seven days a week. That’s why I get the big bucks,” said Stanger, who charges men $25,000 a year and female “millionairesses” $55,000 for 28 months of unlimited introductions. (She finds her female clients take longer to match.)
Whether it’s hooking up her clients with a personal stylist to improve their appearance or enrolling them in an improv class to get over their shyness, “there are 5 million things to do,” she said. There are more details to attend to with clients: manners, appearance, expectations. “In the old days, it was, ‘OK. I know who I’m going to give you. Here she is. Bye.”’
There are two ways to work with a matchmaker. There are the clients who pay for introductions to potential partners and the people with whom those clients are paired. In many cases, the potential partners pay nothing, having joined the matchmaker’s network for free after electronically submitting photos and personal information through a Web site. Equipped with an extensive database of singles, the matchmaker then peruses the possibilities to determine who might be a match and calls in good prospects for one-on-one interviews that help to further hone the pairing in hopes of a click.
Then comes the big unknown: chemistry. A couple could look perfect together on paper, but they can’t know until they’re face to face.
Eight years ago, an actress (who asked to remain anonymous because of what she believes is a lingering social stigma) went on a date through a matchmaking service for the first time. At the time, the then-38-year-old woman thought getting set up through a matchmaker “was crazy” but worth giving a try because she “was never very good at going to Starbucks and seeing the cute guy across the room and smiling.”
After talking on the phone for 2 ½ hours, the two agreed to meet for dinner. “There was an immediate click for me,” she said.
Four and a half months later, they were engaged. Eleven months later, they were married. They now have two kids and are getting ready to celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary.
That actress, it turns out, was part of the first marriage put together by April Beyer, founder of the 11-year-old, L.A. and San Francisco matchmaking service Beyer & Co. Working with 10 to 15 “very special bachelors” per year, each of whom pays her $40,000, Beyer’s talents have since paid off in an additional 29 “I Do’s,” a track record she attributes to understanding what a client needs, not just providing what he says he wants — like a significantly younger woman.
“A lot of times, a man doesn’t know to ask for the woman I give him,” Beyer said. “Matchmakers are not computers. Hopefully our clients are giving us the freedom to be creative and have a bit more latitude.”
That’s a very different idea from many Internet dating sites, which can’t verify all the information provided by their members and which match people based on self-selected criteria, allowing singles to choose their own partners, for better or worse. But increasingly, Internet dating is bringing in a matchmaking component.
In late 2008, Match.com expanded its hunt-and-peck model with a service called the Daily 5, delivering “five matches based on our prediction of which two people would most want to engage in a conversation together,” said Match.com Chief Executive Greg Blatt. In December, the site added yet another matchmaking feature called Singled Out, for “when we have a match with a stronger likelihood of connecting and want to highlight that to our users,” Blatt said.
“A lot of people put their relationships on the wrong course because they select the wrong people,” said Gian Gonzaga, senior director of research and development for Pasadena, Calif.-based EHarmony. “A lot of the things that are powerful forces for initial attraction are different from what makes a relationship successful.”
According to Gonzaga, attraction is important because it gets people into a relationship, but it’s the similarities between individuals that keep them together and lead to more satisfying relationships. It’s that philosophy that’s shaped EHarmony’s extensive member questionnaire and given EHarmony its reputation as the most matchmaker-like of Internet dating services.
If dating is, indeed, a numbers game, then Internet dating sites have the edge. But matchmakers have gut instincts. And for many singles, especially those with more money than time, or more discriminating criteria, or those who, for various reasons, would rather not post a photo online for the entire world to see, that’s even better.
“Women are very attracted to the concept because it’s private. They can’t be browsed,” said Julie Ferman, founder of Cupid’s Coach in Westlake Village, Calif., a matchmaking service that charges $2,500 to $25,000 annually for an average of 2.2 introductions per month and takes both women and men as paying clients.
Matchmaking is strongest among thirty-, forty- and fiftysomethings, according to Fermin. Her average client splits the difference at a median age of 46 and makes at least $50,000.
“If you’re having a hard time making rent or saving for your kid’s college education, I’m the first one to tell someone, ‘Don’t hire a personal matchmaker,’ ” Fermin said.
But if they do have money, Fermin is confident she can help. In 14 years, she says she’s formed the beginnings of more than 144 marriages.
Not everyone’s a believer.
“What smooth James Bond character with a great personal image is going to write a check to meet somebody?” asked L.A.-based dating coach David Wygant. “These men are looking for women they’ve never been able to get in their lives. They want the 27- to 31-year-old even though they’re 46 to 65. And the women, they can tell you they’re in it for love, but they’re looking for guys with money. This is not love. It’s a gold digger looking for a guy that wants eye candy.”
“Nothing is better than opening your eyes and flirting with the people in front of you,” Wygant said. “People need to get out of fantasyland and think somebody else is going to do it for them.”
That is, of course, easier said than done. And the thousands of singles using hundreds of matchmakers — ELove, It’s Just Lunch, the Millionaire’s Club — seem to prove it .
Here’s an article that really “gets it” about Internet dating and the enormous benefit it has been to older people looking for love, in particular, the never marrieds, who it appears are now getting married and never before rates.
SOME WAIT TO TIE THE KNOT
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
When she was still single in her 40s, Debra Siegel made a list of qualities for her yet-elusive perfect husband: honest, family-oriented, a hard worker and physically fit.
But the years passed and the list went unfulfilled.
“When I hit 50, the bells went off,” she says. “I didn’t want to be alone for the rest of my life.”
That’s when she took what she calls “drastic action.”
Her future husband, Dan Furlin, was of a similar mind.
“I didn’t think marriage was in the picture for me,” he says. “Once you hit 50, you don’t want to go through the rest of life without your soul mate. I was a little bit more aggressive.”
Both went the online dating route and met within months. The Dunedin, Fla., couple are both fitness-conscious and vegetarian. They were also both natives of New York state, and each had lived in Los Angeles. They moved to Florida — Furlin to Clearwater and Siegel to Orlando — before meeting online. They married in 2003.
Siegel-Furlin, 56, and Furlin, 58, are among a small but growing group of older adults marrying for the first time after age 45. Years ago, these older singles would have been known as the “spinster” neighbor or the confirmed “bachelor” friend. But now, longer life spans mean 50 is the new 30 — there’s plenty of life ahead. That, coupled with the baby boomer “never-wanna-be-old” attitude and a greater number of aging singles in the population, makes it more likely that those who want to marry actually will.
A USA TODAY analysis of Census records of Americans ages 45-55 shows that the percentage of those who said they had never been married in 2006 had doubled since 1990, and the percentage of those who were currently married had dropped by 9%.
It’s fairly difficult to get a real handle on this segment of the singles population because no federal entity tracks first marriages at specific ages. The closest count is the median age at first marriage, which in 2006 (the latest year for which data are available) was at its highest point: men at 27.5 and women at 25.5, according to the U.S. Census.
A tally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is available just for a 20-year period, 1970 to 1990, shows that in 1990, only 0.4% of women and 0.6% of men married for the first time at ages 45 to 49.
According to the most recent data from the federal Survey of Income and Program Participation, which includes marriage, 13% of those who wed in 2003 were 45 and older.
Internet dating has largely made it possible for many of these later-life first marriages. It’s only in recent years that some sites have started monitoring that demographic. Among them is Yahoo Personals, based in Santa Clara, Calif., which reports a 33% increase from January 2006 to November 2007 among users ages 45 and over who say they have never been married. Since 2005, Match.com reports an increase of almost 10% of new members 45 and older and who have never been married; these now make up almost 14% of its members.
New patterns, new people
“As people get older, they tend to find themselves in fairly established patterns, so the ability to meet new people goes down over time. They’ve got to do something new if they want to meet different people,” says Craig Wax of Dallas, senior vice president and general manager for Match.com for North America.
Brian Lebowitz, 57, and Lise Goldman, 53, are to be married June 22. They met online almost two years ago and found out at the time that they lived within blocks of each other. Lebowitz, an attorney, lives in Washington, D.C. Goldman, who works in economic development, now lives in suburban Chevy Chase, Md. Lebowitz says his job and his hobby as a book collector took up most of his free time. But when he turned 55, he decided to give online dating a shot.
“I’d pretty much given up, but then thought I would give it a try and see what it was like,” he says. “Some people — myself included — would be more comfortable starting off communication by e-mail rather than going up to somebody at a party. It’s a less threatening way to go about it.”
Goldman says she always wanted to be married. She had been engaged twice — once in her mid-20s and again more than a decade ago — but she says it just wasn’t right until she met Lebowitz, whom she says is intelligent and kindhearted.
“There are wonderful people still out there who are hiding away in their work,” she says. “He’s an international lawyer, so he needs to work evenings a lot. That’s been one of the blessings that kept him away from the dating scene.”
Dating websites have been reinventing themselves since online dating took off in the mid-1990s. They’ve refined their methods, largely emphasizing a more scientific approach, which often includes compatibility and personality testing. Others have focused on niche marketing, including Spark Networks, whose online dating sites include JDate for Jewish singles, as well as CatholicMingle.com, InterracialSingles.net, BlackSingles.com, LatinSinglesConnection.com and PrimeSingles.net. That site, as well as lavalifePRIME and BOOMj.com, is among those offering social networking for these older singles.
LavalifePRIME surveyed 1,001 adults ages 45-65 in the USA and Canada last month who are not in a serious relationship and found almost one-third (31%) have never been married.
Carl Weisman of Redondo Beach, Calif., author of So Why Have You Never Been Married?, conducted an online survey for the book and found that 48% of the 1,533 bachelors ages 40 and older who responded said they were afraid of marrying the wrong person.
“They’d rather go to the grave unmarried than marry someone wrong,” says Weisman, 49. “The No. 1 fear is marrying the wrong person — more than not marrying at all — by 10 to 1.”
In addition to the online survey, Weisman conducted lengthy telephone interviews with 30 men. He says writing the book changed his own perspective.
“I was interviewing men 10 years older than me, and I felt like I could look into my future. I was not necessarily afraid, but I realized if I didn’t change things, it was not going to change,” he says.
Just weeks after completing the book, Weisman says he met a woman at a wine-tasting event and they now live together. They’ve talked about marriage; by the time they tie the knot, he expects they will have known each other three years.
Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who developed a personality test for Perfectmatch.com, says the Internet has given never-marrieds new hope for matrimony.
“If you were 50 and you went to a dinner party, what’s the chance of meeting a good selection, if any, of eligible people? People would show you the one person they knew who was single, and you would consider that person very closely, even if they were slightly disturbing, because you weren’t going to meet many,” she says.
Despite being engaged in her 20s, Stacey Kono, 48, of Beaverton, Ore., says she really didn’t think about looking for a husband when she was younger because she wasn’t sure a long-term relationship was for her.
Web of happiness
“It was never on my list of things to do. I just wanted to go to work,” she says. “Because I am financially stable on my own, I did not need a partner.”
Her husband, Terry Kono, 51, also was focused on his career. Because he’s in the military, he was moving at least every three years, which he says made developing a long-term relationship difficult.
But as they got older, both decided to try eHarmony, a site that matches members based on a lengthy compatibility questionnaire.
And they didn’t limit themselves on location: He lived in South Dakota; she was in Las Vegas. They dated for two years until he was transferred to Virginia. She moved to Virginia, and the couple were married last year.
Unlike the Konos, Richard Elliott,54, a software engineer from Bedford, Texas, says he had always wanted to be married, but “it just never happened.”
“I thought I’d buy a house and pool and work on an immaculate lawn, and I thought somebody would just show up. You get all these things and it makes you more attractive, but it doesn’t work that way. You have to get out there and be more proactive,” he says.
In his 40s, he says, he sold the house and bought a sailboat, which led him to meet people. He was in a short relationship with a woman 15 years younger, and after they broke up, he decided to look online. That’s where he met his wife, Cindy. They dated for a year, were engaged a year, and now they’ve been married a year and a half.
Cindy Elliott, a marketing manager, 49, says she had been in a five-year relationship during her early 30s and then figured it was too late for her.
“There was a time when I thought, ‘It’s just not going to happen.’ But the World Wide Web is a wonderful thing,” she says.
Finding a mate gets a lot harder for women once they hit 35 or 40. I just stumbled on this article below that is excellently realistic about the fix that women can get themselves in—with good advice on how to get out of said fix. I’ve underlined the parts that I think are particularly good. What do you think? (Actually, I think the whole thing is so good that I recommend you just read the whole thing.
How to meet a man at 40 It doesn’t get any easier the older you get. So just how do you win the dating game?
Shane Watson
Before we get started, you need to know that the man you fall in love with will bear absolutely no resemblance to the man you were planning to fall in love with. He will live an hour away from where you live, minimum. He will be wearing a shiny suit and, possibly, a brown shirt. And he’ll have the sort of baggage that requires its own baggage handler. This much you can guarantee.
Because one of the reasons you are single (and this is the only one that is strictly your fault) is that you have written off every kind of man who might conceivably cross your path. You have built a fortress out of your preconditions and you are glowering down from the battlements. Men do approach from time to time, but then they see the vats of boiling oil teetering on the ramparts and think better of it.
As far as you are concerned, this fortress is a normal precaution for vetting prospective men, and so it was, initially. Then time passed, you settled into a routine and now you are mistress of the You Won’t Get Past Me checklist.
As it happens, I was set up with the One at a lunch three years before the party at which we officially met. The reason the lunch doesn’t count as the first meeting is because we barely spoke, and the reason we didn’t speak is because I ran his details through the List database and, in 0.2 seconds, it came up with a You Cannot Be Serious rating. Of course it did! The One was very recently divorced (not for me, thanks). He had three children in tow (uh-oh). I think he’d had a savage £5 haircut, and I’m almost certain he was wearing the brown shirt. So, at that first meeting, I summoned the List and the List gave me permission to do nothing.
This List, let’s be clear, is not made up of sensible broad guidelines such as must not be married or should live on same continent; it is extremely specific. Here are some edited highlights from my List, and I’m not making a word of it up:
- Must have hair. Hair is good, but what if top of his List was “must have large breasts”? That puts a rather different complexion on it, doesn’t it?
- Must not have ex-wife or children. Like the pool isn’t small enough as it is.
- Must not wear fleeces. The bulky navy ones. I’m not going to budge on this one. Fleeces say you’re the kind of man who takes his wife to the pub for your anniversary dinner.
- Must not wear short-sleeved shirts. See fleeces. Add golf/ cricket/rugby club to anniversary venue.
- Must not wear jewellery. Although you can tell a lot from jewellery. Any man wearing a leather-thong necklace is certainly a narcissist who still imagines he could have been in the Rolling Stones. Pierced earrings past the age of 40 equal midlife-crisis man. Gold chains on a mahogany chest are the equivalent of the long little fingernail (just plain sleazy).
- Must have a good job, but not one that requires him to get up at 5.30am and take a laptop on holiday.
- Must not wear hoodies or V-neck sweaters with nothing underneath. Hoodies are for boys. And “nothing underneath” is another I Love Myself sign, only this time there’s also the suggestion of And I Am Hot in Bed.
- Must not sing flat. This, too, I stand by.
- Should play sports to fairly high standard. No excuse for this. It’s probably a hangover from school and the presex checklist of a boy’s fanciability.
When you think about it, this List would be more appropriate for an 18-year-old girl. Right now, and without any further ado, you need to abandon the List. Come on, there is nothing on your List that is genuinely non-negotiable. So you hate goatees, get him to shave it off. So you’re allergic to three-quarter-length trousers. Tell him. Liberate yourself. Start over. Not your type? Right, and that’s been such a success for you to date.
After much deliberation, these are the only up-front non-negotiables:
- Must be kind. If you have heard him be vile about anyone, seen him be cruel to animals, children or boring hostesses, then this man is not kind.
- Must like women. You think this goes without saying. Of course every man you’ve ever been out with has loved women. But are you absolutely sure? Did they like it if you contradicted them in public? Were there many women they found attractive who were a) over 50, b) large, or c) noisy? Thought not.
- Must adore you.
- Must be smarter than you, or at least as smart. Smarter, probably, or you will keep looking for that Achilles heel.
- Must have bigger feet than you. Obviously. And must be hairier.
- Must be able to make you laugh in all situations, including when you get to the airport and discover he has no passport.
- You must fancy him unconditionally.
If you cannot put a tick next to all of the above, then I would seriously consider calling it off right now.
So you’ve dumped the List, or at least made a concerted effort to put aside your prejudices. Now what? First, a small pep talk: you need to be ready for this to happen. Long-term single women have been known to get hooked on keeping their options open. You secretly like the feeling that something life-changing might be just around the corner. And the reason you — who travels solo, makes friends easily and never says no to adventure — need to rethink your future is because you may be ready to try everything and risk everything but your heart.
GETTING IN THE ZONE
- Assume that you are going to be having sex in the very near future. It generates that mixture of adrenaline and pheromones that people have been trying to bottle since the beginning of time.
- Make the extra effort. If you go to the party wearing your second-hottest dress, because you are saving your No 1 dress and you’ve already decided that you’ll only stay for an hour, then you might as well not bother. You will not exude the right anything-is-possible glow and the One will look in your direction and think “Downer”.
- Do something differently. Wear heels instead of flats, put on a slithery dress instead of jeans, do something unexpected with your hair (though obviously not involving an Alice band). You won’t necessarily look any better, but you will feel like you’ve changed up a gear. Part of the game (after a period of being overlooked) is believing you are definitely worth some attention, rather than passable in a low-lit environment.
- Lose your friends. I know, this sounds like madness. Who has the single woman got if not her loyal girlfriends? Who is going to bung you in a cab at the end of the night and then ring to check you haven’t fallen asleep in the stairwell? Nonetheless, as much as you love them and need them, your friends will cramp your style. What you don’t need is one of them rolling her eyes as you nibble provocatively on the rim of your champagne glass, or another bellowing: “Go on, do your Hoffmeister bear impersonation!” Plus, if something should happen to develop when your friends are in the vicinity, you can expect them to react in one of the following ways: gawping, followed by circling at a not-discreet- enough distance, texting all your other mutual friends with updates on your progress; giving the double thumbs-up immediately behind his head; leaping in to help things along (Isn’t she just gorgeous. I just love her! Doesn’t she look amazing tonight? Isn’t this brilliant?). Alternatively, if drunk enough, they may start popping up behind sofas, sniggering. This stuff doesn’t change the older you get; if anything, it gets worse. So don’t automatically arrange to go to the party with a couple of girls or, once you get there, rush to find the people you’ve known all your life.
- Pick your man. Don’t wait for him to find you. The One says he saw me steaming across the room, nostrils flared, elbowing women out of my path, but this is not true. I did spot him in the distance and then sort of worked my way across the room in his direction. But it’s true that I made it happen. And then, drum roll please, I did that thing happily single women so often forget to do. I set about making him like me (as opposed to waiting for him to prove to me that he was worth the trouble).
- Flirt and then some. However much you think you are flirting, double it. What the hell, quadruple it. Barely-there flirting will register as average civility, if it registers at all. Singledom makes a girl cautious. She is preoccupied with not looking like a mad, sad, ticking man-huntress. Trust me, you need to be flirting at a level where you think, “Blimey, steady on, he’ll think I’m a pro”, before you can be confident that he has twigged you might quite like him.
SOME RULES OF FLIRTING
- Be intensely interested in everything he says. Casting your eyes around is counterproductive, especially if you’re hunting the canapés.
- Maintain eye contact for long enough that you are both in no doubt it is not accidental.
- Be very impressed.
- Tease, a bit, but not about any of the no-go areas — height, hair, lisp, mothers, his level of inebriation/sweating.
- Flatter, but only lightly, in passing, and not more than once.
- Don’t touch. You could lightly touch his forearm, maybe. But better not.
- Disappear at some point. For roughly 10 minutes. You want him to have the chance to miss you.
- Some say fiddle with your hair, your cleavage, your earrings. I say don’t risk looking like you have fleas. Don’t lick your lips/teeth under any circumstances. He may think you are chasing canapé particles.
- Be extravagantly open about everything (bar medical stuff). Honesty is disarming.
- Make him responsible for you. Say, “Would you get me another drink?”, “Would you let me lean on you while I do up my shoe”, “Would you tell me what you think about buying property when the subprime market is in collapse?” Just kidding.
BEING SUCCESSFULLY SINGLE
Look, meeting a man is not your only goal in life. It doesn’t keep you awake at night (although it has been known to). But the key to being successfully single is keeping an open mind. You want to exude contentment and confidence, but also avoid giving the impression that you are so pleased with your single life, you wouldn’t give it up for anything, including the right man. It’s all about presentation:
- If there is one thing the single woman cannot afford to be, it’s a burden. You must be sunny and amenable, the best guest, the most reliable friend, the tonic at the party and the one who blends in on the family holiday. Precisely because you are not part of a couple, you need to give out the message, loud and clear, that you are no trouble and guaranteed life-enhancing. Being successfully single means having lots of different options and knowing plenty of people who might think, “Yes, bring her along!” rather than, “Maybe not”.
- People notice single women getting drunk more than they would notice any other demographic. They are waiting for you to get swervy and take to the dancefloor, on your own, clutching a bottle of champagne, and then collapse sobbing on the shoulder of some man who has long since married your best friend. All men over the age of 35 have pretty fixed views about women and drink — not women in general, you understand, but women they could be interested in. They love women who drink. They’re crazy about wild party girls. But they are all petrified of a genuinely drunk woman. Uninhibited is good. Determined to dance is good. Singing is good. Stumbling is less good. Slurring is worse. Shouty and argumentative is not good. Legs buckling is bad. Weepy is bad. Sick on floor is really bad. He decided not to call you, by the way, at slurring.
- The single woman must be prepared at all times. Even if you know that the chance of your freshly waxed areas getting man exposure is zero, there is a certain confidence that comes from being good to go at a moment’s notice. Grooming (don’t you hate that word?) works in mysterious ways. I have a friend who is living with a man she first slept with solely because, that same day, she had shelled out for a very expensive seaweed wrap. The seaweed wrap made her a) more confident on account of her baby-soft skin, and b) absolutely determined not to waste her investment. So there’s a possible double incentive for grooming.
- A woman who has a boyfriend can turn up to a party wearing a holey jumper, a ripped skirt and trodden-down ballet pumps and this woman will look bohemian and sexy. A single woman wearing exactly the same, on the same night, will look scruffy, grubby and, possibly, a bit unstable. People will look at her and think: “Poor Susie. She really has given up, hasn’t she?”
There is one unavoidable truth about clothes that many of us are still determinedly avoiding: if you want sex, then you need to dress with sex in mind. Dressing with sex in mind does not, repeat not, mean second-guessing men’s fantasies. That could work, but it will not work nearly as effectively as you wearing whatever you think is blindingly sexy, for two reasons:
a) A woman in slit satin skirt, fishnet tights, clingy top or similar will look like the reluctant deputy headmistress in the school charity performance if she simply isn’t that kind of girl. b) Who knows what men find sexy? It’s different for all of them, and just when you think you have a handle on what they like, they’ll remind you it isn’t that simple. The look you really want to avoid (apart from goth) is what your mother might describe as “lovely”. Lovely is a bias-cut floral dress and kitten-heel slingbacks, wrap dresses worn with cashmere cardigans, and pastel ballerina tops over slinky skirts. Once, a long time ago, the brilliant Isabella Blow told me I must wear a hat if I wanted to find the One. “You have to stand out in a crowd. You have to let them see you,” she said. “And men love a hat. They see the hat and they want to meet the girl.”
I never got around to wearing a hat Isabella-style (shaped like a galleon, blocking out the sun), but I should have taken the point. You don’t have to put a ship on your head to get men to notice you, but if you spend a decade wearing black trouser suits to parties, don’t be surprised if they walk right past you to get to the girl with the parrot on her shoulder.
Sometimes I get questions from women who are dating or thinking about dating a man who is a widower. Divorced men and particularly widowers are prime candidates for remarriage, as the stats in the following article make clear. While it is ideal for the newly single men to have some time to adjust to their loss and figure out how to live single, in truth, these men may move quite quickly into a new relationship. These guys tend to like being coupled and married, and will start looking around to get that way pretty quickly. Even though they might still be a bit risky, for many women, it makes good sense to look at the recently divorced or widowed men seriously. They can be good mate material and likely will not stay single long.
Death do us part; then on to Match.com
Vicki Kennedy makes for a striking widow. Now that she’s said she won’t fill her husband’s senate seat, she has stepped firmly into the national conscience as a public figure of grief. The First Lady holds her hand at presidential conferences and liberals everywhere speak her name at prayer circles. At 55, she might some day remarry. But the odds are against it.
If things were different and Vicki passed before Teddy, chances are he’d be married this time next year. In fact, men are four times more likely to remarry after losing a spouse; 61 percent of men start dating within the first two years, compared to just 19 percent of women. It’s ironic that the same men who hem and haw about being dragged into marriage — there’s a reason women set ultimatums — are the ones who rush to find a ball and chain so soon after losing their spouse.
I’ve toured the circuit of grief groups; the women there often titter about the widowers who come to troll for dates. “They can’t do a load of laundry,” the women say, throwing their hands up in exasperation. “They don’t know how to cook for themselves.” With older widowers especially, men who served as breadwinners while their wives tended the home front, the transition to forced bachelorhood can be rocky. They’re suddenly left wondering who will fold their socks or dust the TV stand.
But, really, it’s more than the housework. My feeling is that there’s a companionship that develops in marriages, a profound understanding that’s hard to duplicate. We learn the most intimate details about someone over the course of a marriage: how they sleep with their mouth open or litter the sink with hairs after they shave. It’s these same details that grate on us over time, that drive couples to alcohol, recreational drugs and — worse — marriage counseling. But what we gain in this exchange, this soul-level knowledge of another human being, is a partner who knows us just as intimately.
Abel Keogh, who lost his wife when he was 26 years old, echoes this feeling.
“In my case, I really missed being married,” he says. “You can share your problems, your joys. You take pleasure in their life and they take pleasure in yours.” Mr. Keogh has gone on to write a book on grieving for men, “Room for Two,” and runs the online Facebook group, “Dating a Widower.” He tells men who have lost a spouse and are considering dating again to take a step back and evaluate the situation. “Make sure it’s for the right reasons,” he says, “and not just because you’re lonely.”
Which is good advice for all of us. So often we rush into relationships wanting to be known and we are quick to dismiss our partners when they fail to comprehend us fully. Instead of dashing headlong into a break-up at the first sign of discord, we would be wise to stick with some relationships for the long haul. To know someone fully — and to be known by them — takes time. For most of us, that means a lifetime.
I love it when Forbes magazine writes about dating. Here’s an article below about the problems of high-powered women in finding love. While both high-powered men AND women have similar problems making time for romance, women have the additional dilemma of being too high powered for many—if not most—men. And while power makes men MORE marketable, it makes women less so.
The Dating Game
Kiri Blakeley
Attention eligible bachelors: Sabina Ptacin would like to meet you. She’s the owner of two successful companies and is energetic and sociable.
She looks a bit like the actress Kate Winslet, with green eyes and sandy blonde hair. There’s only one problem: She spends so much time working, she breaks more dates than she keeps. “I’m not going to marry either one of my jobs,” admits Ptacin, who nevertheless often puts in 100-hour workweeks.
Loretta Talbot, a senior project manager at Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant, wants a relationship too. She has a zest for life and enjoys photography and sailing. But it’s not a sure thing that a man will call for a second date once he finds out how much real estate she owns.
Finding one’s soul mate is never easy. But for women who are pursuing influential careers—women like Ptacin, Talbot, even Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—the course of true love can be especially tricky. It’s not just a matter of trying to find the time to date when you’re working around the clock. Women face far more complex hurdles. Unlike their male counterparts, who generally become more desirable in the romance arena as they achieve higher career status, powerful women are often handicapped by their success.
And antiquated social mores still dictate that no matter how commanding a woman is at work, she should let her date choose the wine in a dimly lit restaurant.
“Successful men are viewed as highly desirable for women, but successful women are viewed as really scary by men,” says Patricia Cook, who runs a boutique executive recruiting firm and has worked with hundreds of senior level executive men and women. “A man needs to be confident and secure in himself in order to be with a woman who earns more than he does.”
Time Is Not On Her Side
A compatible partner can be hard to find, especially when time is hard to come by. Justice Sotomayor married her high school sweetheart just before starting Yale Law School in 1976, but they divorced seven years later. She subsequently acknowledged the difficulty she faced as a young ambitious lawyer who often had to cancel dates because of late nights at the office or sudden business trips. “He begins thinking, ‘Gee, maybe she’s not that interested,’‘’ she has said. She had hopes of remarrying in her mid-40s, but that fiancé broke off the relationship and ended up marrying a younger woman. At 55, Sotomayor remains single.
The experience is shared by younger women like Ptacin, who turned 31 this year and spent the last half of her 20s co-founding a public relations firm, Red Branch, and a community for women entrepreneurs, Collective-E. She put off romance to focus on her personal and professional growth. Now both of her New York companies are humming along, and she’s ready to pursue a relationship.
But her seven-days-a-week workday begins at 7 a.m., and the e-mailing and problem-solving can go on until as late as 10 p.m., not to mention the evenings she’s out at business events or traveling to visit clients in Toronto, Washington and other cities.
As an entrepreneur, Ptacin has to “triage” her daily commitments by order of importance. Her businesses usually take precedence, especially when she suspects a prospective suitor isn’t going to turn out to be Mr. Right. “You don’t have the luxury of dating someone who might not be a good fit for you and just seeing what happens,” she explains. “There’s no time to date just for fun.”
Not surprisingly, she adds, “I end up canceling dates a lot.” Once, when Ptacin had rescheduled a get-together for the fourth time via text message, the man picked up the phone and “really went off on me,” she says. “He asked if we were ever going to go out or if he should just move on.” She let him move on.
Since the ‘70s women’s work hours have increased steadily, especially for those in managerial, professional or technical occupations. According to a study published in 2004 by Harvard University Press, 17% of women in those fields worked 50 hours or more each week, compared with 8% of women in other occupations.
When there are only so many hours in a day, something has to give, says Ann Smith, a Wernersville, Pa., marriage and relationship therapist. “It’s hard to be great at two things at the same time,” she says. “You can’t put 120% into the office and give the same amount of focus to your romantic life.”
The Achievement Dilemma
Even when they do reserve time to date, however, executive women may find that the very qualities they’ve needed to get ahead in business work against them in romance. Prevailing conventional wisdom—reinforced everywhere from the retro dating bible The Rules to the Bravo television series The Millionaire Matchmaker—holds that traits such as assertiveness and decisiveness are a turnoff to men.
“We tell women to let the guy call, let the guy decide if he wants to go out again, let the guy pick you up and don’t grill him on the phone about his background and whether he wants to have kids,” says Sherri Murphy, owner of Elite Connections, a Los Angeles matchmaking service.
Susan Posnick, a Dallas cosmetics executive in her 50s who looks at least a decade younger, thinks men where she lives view her success as a liability. It isn’t that Dallas men don’t like well-heeled women, explains Posnick, who is divorced with a 17-year-old daughter. It’s just that they’re more comfortable with women who have come into money through family or divorce. “They’re not so interested in successful businesswomen,” she says. “They’re more interested in trophies.”
Even younger women who were encouraged to compete with boys in school say they risk getting rejected if they too boldly tout their achievements. Wyeth executive Talbot went out with an information technology specialist who, after seeing her three-bedroom home in an upscale New Jersey suburb, commented, “I’d have to get another job in order to keep dating you.” The potential romance fizzled before Talbot could reveal that she also owned two rental properties and a boat.
Salary and asset differences are deal breakers for many a potential couple. But it isn’t just men who balk when a woman earns or owns more. Many women can’t envision marrying someone they view as lower on the financial and status totem pole, says Helen Fisher, a research professor at the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type.
“For evolutionary reasons, women have always looked for a partner who has status, resources and money, and can help her raise babies,” she says. “As long as our society holds money so dear, with men as the primary providers, successful women are going to have a problem in the dating market. Although this is changing,” contends Fisher.
Peach Reasoner, a divorced 58-year-old recording studio owner in Santa Monica, Calif., puts it this way: “You have this long laundry list of things you want a guy to be. And when you meet, you’re still computer processing: ‘Does he match up here? Check. Here? Check.’” She’s been dating—finance types, entrepreneurs, a photographer—but over the last two years, none has met all of her checklist criteria.
Love For Money
In order to increase their chances of finding a good match, many women are taking matters into their own hands and are joining online dating sites or hiring a matchmaker.
At the Internet service eHarmony, which caters to singles seeking long-term relationships, the number of female members earning over $125,000 has grown 85% in two years. For one-on-one dating coaches and matchmakers, who charge as much as six figures for their expertise, business has increased 8% since 2005, and the cottage industry now pulls in $260 million annually, according to research firm Marketdata Enterprises. Overall, the dating services industry, which also includes singles Web sites such as Match.com and in-person meet-up groups such as It’s Just Lunch, is a $1.8 billion industry.
Wyeth executive Talbot has been working occasionally with New York dating coaches Matt Titus and Tamsen Fadal, who charge $1,500 for six one-on-one sessions. Titus explains the difference between matchmakers and dating coaches this way: “Matchmakers bring the fish. We teach you to fish.” To that end, the couple advise Talbot on the best New York City watering holes in which to cast her line (Wall Street hangouts Wolfgang’s Steakhouse and Harry’s Café), how to bait a hook (approach a man confidently, hand him your card and then pretend you have somewhere else to be) and how to reel ‘em in (don’t talk too much about your busy schedule, which can make him feel like you don’t need him).
Talbot is still looking but thinks the coaching has been worth the price. “A year ago I wouldn’t approach men. I wasn’t as confident. But I realized unless I take control of things nothing will happen.”
Posnick, the Dallas cosmetics executive, is having fun dating men she has met while on business trips to different cities. And Ptacin, the public relations entrepreneur, now reserves one day a week—usually Sunday—to socialize, either on a date or with friends. “I won’t allow myself to look at the BlackBerry anymore when I’m out with friends,” she says. “And I’m meeting many more interesting people this way.”
She has also stopped dating men from her media and entrepreneurial circles, because that just leads to more work: “Who wants to talk about pitching angles on a date?”
Ptacin is hopeful she’ll eventually find her match because she has known men who enjoyed being attached to ambitious women. Her father, a physician, is her role model. When her mother started a catering business in her 30s, Ptacin’s father did everything from washing dishes to coming along on catering jobs. “I do want a family and a life, but I need someone like my father,” Ptacin says. “Or I need a wife.”
I’m always on the look out for facts and figures about being single and wanting to be paired up. Here’s a new set from People Media, underlines are mine.
Half of Single Americans Prefer a Partner over Staying Solo, According to New Survey from People Media
As “National Unmarried and Single Americans Week” kicks off, more than half of that group – 52 percent – say they would opt to have a partner over having the freedom to date, live independently or spend their time or money as they choose.
At the same time, an almost equal number – 48 percent – appreciate the myriad freedoms afforded by single living, naming one or another as the best aspect of being unhitched.
Those are the principal findings of a new nationwide online poll conducted by People Media, Inc., the No. 1 provider of targeted online dating communities. Running from September 20-26, National Unmarried and Single Americans Week is an annual commemoration which, for the past 20 years, has given recognition to single life and the contributions of singles to society.
According to the People Media poll, the craving for companionship cuts across virtually all demographic lines. At the same time, the poll found that many singles are, in fact, willing to acknowledge the benefits that arise from living solo.
The findings came from statistically significant responses at 13 of People Media’s sites – including those that cater to seniors, African-Americans, single parents, Christians, baby boomers, and other people of like interests—in a poll posted from late August through early September.
More than 27,000 single Americans answered the question, “What do you like best about being single?” with the following responses.
- “Nothing; I’d rather have a partner”—52 percent
- “The freedom to spend my time as I choose”—33 percent
- “Living alone”—7 percent
- “Being able to date”—4 percent
- “The freedom to spend my money as I choose”—4 percent
Although a slight majority of respondents believe there is no real benefit to being single (52 percent), nearly half recognizes the advantages of being unattached. A full third of all respondents named “the freedom to spend my time as I choose” as the top benefit of their single status (33 percent), along with smaller percentages that value solo living (7 percent), freedom to date at will (4 percent), and having total control over the purse strings (4 percent).
“Would you call this ‘making lemonade out of lemons’ or is it about appreciating the taste of lemonade? I think it’s really both,” said Josh Meyers, CEO, People Media, Inc. “There’s no question that people have a deeply rooted drive for connection and companionship, whether it’s about friendship or marriage, and that’s why online dating communities are thriving.
“According to 2006 US Census data, there are 92 million American adults who are single and unmarried,” added Meyers. “Whether one is single by choice or by circumstance while searching for a relationship, there can be an upside like having total decision-making over how to spend one’s time, which one-third of our respondents named as the best thing about being single. As National Unmarried and Single Americans Week signifies, it’s more than okay to be single.”
Dissecting Singlehood
In addition to top-line results from the more than 27,000 poll respondents in total, the data has been analyzed according to the specific People Media site to which respondents chose to join. Among the findings.
- Those most likely to say there’s nothing best about being single (52 percent on average) include members of the Christian-affiliated LoveAndSeek.com site (64 percent), SingleParentsMeet.com (59 percent) and Mormon-oriented LDSPlanet.com (59 percent).
- Members of SeniorPeopleMeet.com are more likely than others to appreciate the freedom to spend their time as they wish (39 percent vs. 33 percent on average).
- On the other hand, those who identify around religion such as members of LoveAndSeek.com or LDSPlanet.com place the least value on deciding how to spend their time unilaterally (24 percent and 26 percent respectively, vs. 33 percent on average).
- Members of LatinoPeopleMeet.com are the most likely to appreciate the freedom to date (10 percent vs. 4 percent on average); members of BlackChristianPeopleMeet.com and those at SeniorPeopleMeet.com place the least emphasis on this (2 percent each).
- Compared to other groups, members of LDSPlanet.com are the least likely to name living alone as the best thing about being single (4 percent vs. 7 percent, on average).
- Having solitary control over money doesn’t register high as a benefit of being single. Just 3-7 percent of respondents across all groups cited financial autonomy.
When viewing responses by age, the younger the respondent, the more likely he or she is to appreciate the freedom to date: 10 percent for ages 18-24 and 8 percent for ages 25-34; 2 percent for ages 55-64 and 65+.
- The same age breakdown essentially applies to the benefits of living alone: younger respondents enjoy it more (9 percent for ages 18-24 and 10 percent for ages 25-34) than older singles (5 percent for ages 55-64 and just 4 percent for those 65+).
- At any age, controlling one’s money does not register as an important advantage of being single (4 percent for all age categories except 25-34, which came in at 5 percent).
My client Leslie has been working her way through my book “Find a Sweetheart Soon! Your Love Trip Planner for Women” and also my ecourse “Ten Days to Get Lucky at Love.” She’s a great student and taking to it all like “a fish to water.” After President Obama’s Inauguration, she emailed me the following – I liked her views so much that I asked if I could preprint it here so you could enjoy it too:
On page 16 of “Get Lucky at Love,” you write:
“BTW, women find men who can dance VERY attractive. And a man willing to get out on the dance floor, despite not being perfect, can ask any woman there to dance. And she will probably say ‘Yes.’”
Analytical student-type that I am, I’m looking everywhere for Love Luck and Bright Spots, and I found one in the coverage of the inaugural festivities. What I saw really proves what you say about guys learning to dance—or even trying to dance. Just a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have seen this myself, so thanks a lot for that, too!
Everyone—absolutely everyone—is talking about the new President and First Lady and their first dance. The recap on ABC opened and closed with footage from it. They do look terrific; I think it’s the first time I’ve thought any of our American presidents actually looked romantic. But here’s the thing. President Obama isn’t doing anything all that complicated. People are saying that they “glided” through a “slow, dignified two-step,” but it’s the same left-LEFT, right-RIGHT, three-two-one-spinnn that I remember from high school.
So lesson A: You do not have to know how to move like a professional to look awfully good. You just have to look comfortable and into your partner. People will think you’re attractive even if you’re the President.
Fewer people are talking about the new Vice President’s first dance, but he’s happy to say why. He says he can’t dance. He’ll tell anyone who will stand still long enough to listen. He freely admits stalling so that he won’t have to dance as long. But here’s the thing. The new VP DID dance in front of the assembled company, even if he didn’t think he was good at it. And for double bonus points, he said he might not care much for dancing but he loved being close to his wife.
So lesson B: Willingness will get you almost as far as ability. In some cases, it will get you even farther.
Now, there were doubtless tons of guys at the inaugural balls who couldn’t dance, told their dates they couldn’t dance and then punished themselves and their dates by refusing to dance. I can’t say for sure because no one at all is talking about them.
Which leads us to lesson C: You only lose if you don’t play.
Dance-shy people take notice!
Talk to you Friday,
Leslie
When I was dating online back in 1998, I met a guy who not only was doing online dating, but also “It’s Just Lunch” and several other organized activities. When I asked him why he was doing all those things as well as Match.com, he said his philosophy was to start up as many avenues as possible that might lead to love, the more, the better. While I think that Internet dating is the best thing since sliced bread for singles, I agree that Match.com and the like are not the only shows in town when it comes to finding love. This fellow was right: The more options that you create for finding a partner, the more likely it is that you will find one.
I’ve been interested in the Meetup Group phenomenon for awhile, and last week I met with a woman who is active here in Tallahassee Meetup groups. We actually met because she wants a Romance Coach, but come to find out, she coordinates several Meetup Groups here and has had dates and relationships with men she has met through the Meetup Groups. For those of you who don’t know, here’s the definition of Meetup for Wikipedia:
Meetup.com (also called Meetup) is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. Users enter their ZIP code (or their city outside the United States) and the topic they want to meet about, and the website helps them arrange a place and time to meet. Topic listings are also available for users who only enter a location.
Meetup has only been around a few years now, really taking off after 2002. Meetup’s became part of the political action in Howard Dean’s campaign, then John Kerry and John Edwards. The grass roots efforts that were so important in getting Barack Obama elected have a strong Meetup flavor.
But Meetup is far more than a political movement. Meetup groups spring up for all kinds of reasons, but basically, they are a way for people to with similar, perhaps obscure, interests to meet when they otherwise would not.
A segment of the singles population that really suffers in the online dating world are those with disabilities, particularly disabilities that show up in looks. Thank goodness that dating sites have cropped up that cater to the disabled population. Just Google a disability and “Dating site” and I’ll bet you find something somewhere for folks who are similar. But it can be real hell on the mainstream sites if you are less than perfect. Online Dating magazine is starting a column for disabled daters. Here’s the first one:
Dating with Disabilities
by Melissa Blake
What Does it Mean to Love in Today’s World?
Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome Melissa Blake to the Online Dating Magazine team where she will be writing about dating with disabilities on a weekly basis.
My good friend, Claire, once dubbed me “a downhome Carrie Bradshaw.’ I’m not quite sure what exactly she meant by this moniker, but she coined it one day after we’d had lunch together at our local diner. She later told me she saw me zooming down the street in my wheelchair, past the lagoon on a bright, sunny day, chatting away on my cell phone. I took the new name as a compliment; I suppose this puts me somewhere in the middle of a fast-talking, fall-in-love-too-fast power girl from Manhattan and a laid-back and hugely awkward girl from a small Midwestern town.
So who am I, really, besides just a girl sitting behind a computer screen and giving you an inside look at my heart and my thoughts?
I’m the girl who can usually be found wearing a chic polo shirt (red is my favorite!). I’m the girl who is a bit awkward, a bit dorky and still a bit innocent. I’m the girl who isn’t afraid to laugh at herself. I’m the girl who still, at 27, celebrates her half birthday. I’m the girl who colors outside the lines. I’m the girl who is bold and confident (though I’m not sure men have picked up on my boldness yet). I’m the girl who likes to leave a little mystery behind her.
I’m the girl who writes about anything and everything in her life, even the boys she falls madly in love with who don’t even know she exists. I’m the girl who is still so shy that she gives said boys code names in said writing (you’ll see….). I’m the girl who’s mastered the art of loving from afar, but ultimately, never having the courage to tell the gorgeous, sweet, funny, charming guy that he is, in fact, gorgeous, sweet, funny and charming. Or when I try, it always ends up not sounding anywhere near as sleek and sophisticated as it did in my head.
I’m the girl who, at 16, wrote a list in my diary of Personality Traits I Want My Future Husband To Possess. I’m also the girl who lets these 20 traits guide her heart still today.
I’m the girl who thinks imperfections are beautiful and sexy.
And I’m also the girl who has overcome great obstacles – 27 surgeries, countless hospitalizations and enough needle pokes to last me two lifetimes – despite being born with a physical disability. I’ve never let it define who I am or my life, but in the last few years, oddly, my disability has seemingly morphed into the defining factor when it comes to my attempts to strut my stuff on the dating scene. I ve often asked myself these questions: How can you get someone (a guy, in my case) to look past your disability – or any other of your insecurities – and see the real you. Not the you with makeup on. Not the you wearing a sparkling dress and heels. Not even the you who smiles even though
she’s sad. The real you – without makeup, metaphorically naked and not ashamed to show people who you are.
I can’t say I have all that much experience in the world of love, romance and the intensity of relationships that drives people to do crazy things in the name of love. In all honesty, when it comes to said relationships (especially those involving the opposite sex), my run-ins have all had three things in common: dorky, awkward and quirky.
But I do know I’ll find The Big L someday.
What’s better than redefining love altogether? Injecting my own brand of quirkiness into it – in heavy doses. The way I see it, love and relationships are like a one-way street always under road construction. You can see your destination, but can’t quite get there, right? And let’s not even get started on all those confusing signs pointing every which way. What do those signs even mean?
But really, what does it mean to love in today’s world? What is it that keeps our blood pumping and our hearts racing? Because let’s face it, love in the modern age, with an inbox full of emails and an overflow of texts messages, isn’t what it was even 10 years ago. The ways we find love and the ways we keep it have all changed, and I, just like you, am trying to keep up.
Come along for the journey; you might learn a thing or two about yourself along the way.
Who knows? Maybe someday I really will be the Midwest’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw. Anyone up for a glass of spiked lemonade on the porch?
~ Melissa
P.S. I realize this all sounds like one big profile on Match.com. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll let you be the judge.
The longer you have been single, the more used to the single state you are and the more likely it is that you will stay that way.
I don’t have any research to back me up on that, but frankly I am pretty sure that is so. Particularly if you have never been coupled (living together for a year or more) or married before at all.
It’s pretty hard in our culture to have managed not to marry at least once by the time you are 35 or 40, if you are heterosexual. The pressures to couple and marry are fierce. In fact, you probably worked a bit to stay uncoupled, either avoiding dating at all, or getting out of developing relationships before committing.
Being and staying single is what you know how to do. Your thoughts and behaviors keep you that way. And you will probably stay single without putting in enormous effort to get different results.
Interestingly, singles are often unaware of what they do that keeps them single.
Most folks have some ambivalence about looking for love. Ambivalence means having thoughts, feelings, or actions that are in contradiction to each other, like love and hate. Because it is hard for us to keep two conflicting thoughts or emotions conscious and in focus, we are often aware of only one side of the ambivalence. Therefore, you may think and believe that you want to find a partner, that you are willing to do anything in order to get one, but you may also be equally unsure or not wanting to give up your single privileges, and you act unconsciously to undermine your best efforts to get what you think you want.
What might you be doing that undermines your finding love?
If you are stumped, take a hop over to my readers’ “50 Ways to BLEEP Your Lover” for a funny take on the question. But I’ve got some serious suggestions that might be indications of ambivalence:
 You do nothing that will move you towards finding love.
You think that love should “just happen” with no effort on your part.
You are always “too busy” in the present and vow to start sometime in the future when you have time. But that time never comes.
Perhaps you are listed on a dating site, but you do not post a photo. Or your profile essay is negative or otherwise poorly written.
You never make the first contact to potential partners.
You are critical of those who contact you.
You do not answer first or later emails promptly, waiting days or weeks to respond.
You complain about how much time Internet dating takes and the poor quality of people on your dating site.
You have long lists of “must have’s” and “deal breakers” that eliminate just about everyone.
Your schedule is so full that it is next to impossible to arrange even a coffee date.
You don’t show up at the first meeting, or you get lost, or you are late, or you change plans multiple times and then complain when your date backs out.
You are negative and critical at you first meeting, complaining about other dates or your ex.
You focus on some small detail that totally turns you off to your date, like he is balding or she is a little heavier than her pictures indicated, or he doesn’t talk easily, or she can’t spell.
You do not express positive interest, even if you are interested, and leave getting in contact again after that meeting to your date.
You consistently are not interested in people who are attracted to you, are reasonably healthy emotionally, and are truly available for a relationship.
You are interested in complicated, artistic, wealthy, elusive, moody, or eccentric people who perhaps are married or otherwise paired, or never married, alcoholic or drug-addicted, unemployed or deviant.
You expect your partner to make your life exciting. But exciting may really be a synonym for scary.
Well, as you probably can guess, I could go on and on. But I am sure you get the picture.
Now, if you keep reading, fair warning: I’m going to spoil it for you. You won’t be able to use your old excuses as reasons why you are single.
You are the reason. The consistent factor in your staying single is you.
And it’s not because you are fat or short or bald or use a cane to get around. Plenty of short, fat, bald, lame people are in relationships or married. The fact that you aren’t one of them is you.
Ugh. That’s the bad news, hard to hear and not easy to deliver, believe me. But there’s good news, too, because if you are the reason you are single, then you can do something about it.
Neenah, you go girl! Go on over and take a look at what Neenah is doing to find love.
New Jersey Woman Launches Web Site to Find Husband in ‘09
Off-beat news.
Neenah Pickett has a unique New Year’s resolution: Find a husband, or quit dating for a year.
The 42-year-old Somerset, N.J., woman created a spin on online dating by launching a Web site, 52weeks2findhim.com, on New Year’s Day.
Pickett told Gannett New Jersey that she’s not looking for someone to support her, but she would like to find someone to settle down with.
So what does she want in a mate? Pickett said a sense of humor and laid-back attitude are important.
If Pickett doesn’t meet Mr. Right by next New Year’s Eve, she’ll take a year off from dating.
Cereal daters
By Rod McPhee
Finding a partner over breakfast - it’s the next big thing, apparently. Rod McPhee dropped in on a Leeds event to find out how it works and, more importantly, if it works.
MARIE is eyeing up the staircase bannister which is smack bang in the centre of the bar.
“I love going down on them backwards.” says the 45-year-old divorcee and mother of three. “It’s my party trick. I was half tempted just to leap up during one
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of my dates and do it – just to break the ice, you know.”
Marie isn’t over-impressed. Not because three minutes wasn’t enough to get an insight into the men who attended this breakfast speed dating event but because it was sometimes too long.
The 13 women in attendance are seated around The Living Room bar and the 15 men who’ve also come along have to switch tables every time the organisers ring a bell.
“I wish they’d put a bell on my table,” says Marie. “I’d have rung it myself after about three seconds with some of them. God, some of them were so boring, just not my type at all.
“That said, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the quality of people here, if you know what I mean. It’s not a sleazy thing at all, which is what I sort of expected it to be, if I’m honest.
“It’s all very civilised really, even if I didn’t actually like anyone I met, and I have to say I would give it another try.”
Quality is pretty much a given at these events since all those taking part have signed up with the organisers http://www.datingdirect.com who’ve organised three breakfast speed dating events around the UK.
Leeds was chosen, alongside Birmingham and London, because it’s one of the cities which boasts the highest number of subscribers to their online service.
But why speed date over breakfast?
Katie Mowe is the company’s lady with the bell. “Well, it’s the complete opposite of an evening event if you think about it. We’ve held some of those before and whenever there’s alcohol involved it gets to the point where we turn up the lights at the end of the night and there are couples snogging in the corner!
Less pressure
“I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that from our point of view, but other people don’t necessarily want that kind of environment. With breakfast it’s much less pressure, much less intense.”
That sentiment was echoed by Mark, a 29-year-old hospital worker who has come along with best friend Marie to offer some moral support.
“I think it does work, actually,” he says. “And I think it works because you have a set period of time in which to talk to everyone so you know that if you don’t like someone, or anyone, you can just go through the motions and leave, or if you do meet someone you like you can arrange to meet again.
“Whereas if it’s in the evening, or even over lunch it feels much more formal and you can sometimes end up with the same kind of atmosphere as going out to a bar or club or something and that’s exactly the kind of thing I hate.
“The whole reason I’d consider doing this is to avoid a situation where you’re trying to get to know someone by shouting over thumping music, getting pushed around by drunk people.
“The only reason I haven’t met someone here today is because there just aren’t many around my age.”
Professional
The age range does vary substantially. The youngest is 28, the oldest 48, with the majority in their 30s. And, if appearances are anything to go by, the majority look like professional people – and a quick check of the datingdirect.com’s list confirms that in attendance is a teacher, a surveyor and a handful of self-employed businessmen and women.
Among them is Lisa Randerson, a 35-year-old who runs a business in Wakefield handling accident claims. She’s been divorced for eight years, during which time she’s rediscovered herself but now wants to find herself a suitable man too.
“I know it sounds a bit funny,” she laughs, “but looks aren’t that important to me. I need someone who’s a professional so I can feel they’re on some kind of level with me. I want someone I can talk to and have a laugh with.
“I thought I’d stand a better chance doing that through something like this because it has something of a structure to it and you know you’re likely to meet a particular type of person.
“I’m a very sociable person and go out all the time. I even let guys give me numbers and stuff but it’s all so random – you never know who they are, what they do, what they’re about before spending any amount of time.
“And what’s great is, I’ve actually spoken to a couple of guys here I’d really like to get to know a bit better.”
So, at least one satisfied customer. But why not more? More pertinently, why didn’t more people attend?
“There is still a bit of a stigma attached to it,” says co-organiser Daisy Swan, who’s been ensuring every man gets to meet every woman during the two hour event. “Up until about four years ago internet dating and speed dating was seen as something for losers
“Which is strange because in Europe online dating is seen as something on a par with going on Facebook really, but over here it’s still something people want to keep secret, even though that’s changed a lot now.
“So getting people to attend something like this can be tricky, but it’s definitely growing in popularity. In London we had something like 35 people attend and in Birmingham there were some absolutely gorgeous people – a couple of the guys I wouldn’t have minded going on a date with, but I couldn’t, obviously.”
Things are going swimmingly when controversy arises – someone, at some point, has decided they really rather liked one of their brief breakfast dates and gone back for seconds, knocking the order of rotation out of kilter.
It seems it will take more than orange juice and pastries to negate human nature, but the organisers don’t seem to mind too much. They ring the bell, clear the plates and quickly check the corners of the room, just in case.
Here’s a letter I ran across in a Dr. Joyce column that I hear over and over again from new clients, in one version or another. Read through the letter and then see my comments below:
DEAR DR. BROTHERS: I am a divorced mom in my late 40s. I have two kids in high school, and although I haven’t dated much since their father remarried, I am interested in meeting someone, perhaps on the Internet. My problem is that I am afraid to post a description, put up a photo, meet someone or even send an e-mail. I keep thinking that if my teens were to see what I am doing, they would be very embarrassed. Can I ever overcome this paralysis, and if so, how?—B.A.
DEAR B.A.: Wow. You seem to be completely paralyzed by the prospect of Internet dating—so I wonder why the idea is even attractive to you. It almost seems as though you have picked a way of meeting people and dating that you can’t possibly feel comfortable doing, and so you have found a good reason for doing nothing. Staying home and not rocking the boat will not have any possibility of embarrassment for your kids—but it may have downsides that you don’t want to acknowledge. It’s OK to want to date several years after being divorced—your ex-husband has moved on and even remarried; presumably, your kids aren’t freaked out about that.
It seems like you want to date but for some reason are mired in guilt and fear of the unknown. It is admirable that you are so aware of your responsibilities as a mother and role model for your children, but you may be overestimating their interest in your personal life. They probably just want you to be happy, and as long as you conduct yourself like the good person they know you to be, there is little to fear. But I bet if you were to sit down and talk to them about it now, you’d find they will encourage you. Perhaps you should start out without the computer though, since you seem to be so frightened of the experience. Ask friends for introductions, then go from there.
Okay, I am back. Just about everyone, but in particular, women, have a very hard time getting started with Internet dating. The directness of posting an ad and a photo, along with a descriptive statement that acknowledges your desire for love seems so embarrassing, public, and distasteful. Women feels this somewhat more so than men, but men worry too. I think at least part of the difficulty for women, those of us who are a little older than 40, is that we had such strong messages about not showing interest in men or sex. If a guy pursued anyway, well, great, but for heaven’s sake, don’t let them know you are interested.
Also, interest in dating means putting most vulnerable self out there with little protection from hurt. So it is normal to feel considerable ambivalence (both yes and no) about getting started. I think that Dr. Joyce got the part right that the woman in question should talk to her children and let them know what she is thinking about, and I too bet they would encourage her. Young people now are far less inhibited about sex and love that we were, and they have little worry at all about the Internet.
Dr. Joyce’s second part of advice, to get her friends to set her up, is horrid, though! Talk about feeling public! Venturing onto Internet dating sites is much safer and protective of the ego, and there are ways to ease your way in without becoming front page news in your own home town. If you want to know how, just ask me.
I’ve said any number of times that Internet dating is the closest grownup singles have to the experience of being in college. College is the last time you probably were in an environment where just about everyone was single and looking. Little did we know then that things were going to change big time one we left for the real world. This column below is from “The Flat Head” out of the College of William and Mary. The author, Maya Horowitz, speaks with wisdom from the other side—she is still an undergrad, it seems, but recognizes what a good deal college people have when it comes to finding sex. She also correctly recognizes that the next best thing to being in college when you are a grownup is Internet dating. Yes, as she goes on later, online dating is not perfect and has its hazards, but for those of us over 21, it’s the best thing to happen yet.
Jeez, though, when I was in college, our paper NEVER had columns like this one….
Behind Closed Doors: College: the perfect sexual paradise
By Maya Horowitz
My Thanksgiving break was marred by a harrowing look into our collective sexual future. All of what I’m about to say may be obvious, but I think it bears repeating because most of us forget to think about it.
College is the sexual jackpot. Granted, the College of William and Mary may not be the orgiastic sexual Valhalla that some of us would like it to be, but we’ve still got things pretty good. With around 5,000 undergraduates, the vast majority of whom are unmarried, finding a coital partner should be as easy as pie (apple pie that’s warm and gooey inside).
Now, maybe it hasn’t been so easy for you so far. But let’s just take a step back and think about this for a second. The sexual environment on the College’s campus is unlike anywhere else. There are thousands of us, independent for the first time in our lives, stuck together in the middle of colonial-nowhere with very little responsibility and a lot of free time. All of our bodies are young, hot, supple, panting, panting, panting, searching, waiting, expecting, seeking release …
Ahem, I may have digressed. The point is that there are a lot of good-looking people (it’s easy to be beautiful when you’re young and healthy) living in close quarters. The chances of you living in a sexual environment as fertile as this one ever again are very slim. When we graduate, the balloon bursts (and not in a sexy, cherry-popping sort of way).
If you attend graduate school, you may be surrounded by a large number of individuals again, but many of them will be older or married. Those who are not will still probably have their own thing going on. Chances are, you won’t be attending loose sexual dance parties themed “bros and hos” when you’re 25.
As a working professional, you can’t expect your colleagues to be young, single or ready-to-mingle. You may meet singles at bars, but you’re entering at your own risk. You have no way of knowing anything about the random hottie you approach. At least here, when you’re at the delis, you can expect the chick you’re approaching to be a little nerdy, very smart and touchy about the whole “applying to UVA” thing.
What it comes down to is that the real world is scary. As in, scary because there aren’t enough opportunities for safe fucking.
The beacon of hope for our generation is online dating. Services such as match.com and eHarmony are becoming more and more popular. Most of you probably scoff at the idea of using one of these services, but the stigma of needing help in the dating scene is being sloughed off in favor of a modern approach to seeking a mate. Many of my older friends and family have used these services successfully.
But, here’s the catch: Online dating is vicious. You may be matched on 1,500 levels of compatibility, but the first thing prospective daters do is check out all of your pictures. Even with Myspace angles, sepia tinting and sixty different shots of your gorgeous face, a dater may find one picture they don’t like and fixate on it. Or they might check out what you’ve written about yourself and decide that you don’t seem that great.
When you meet someone in person, you get the benefit of the doubt. Your personality and charm may win them over, even if they’re not used to dating girls who are taller than 5’6’’. Online dating essentially allows people to filter out potential mates for idiotic reasons. Sure, I’d love to date a man with a body that looks like it’s cut from marble, but in real life I’m going to give the guy with a few extra pounds a chance. Whereas on match.com, I’d probably click away and never look back.
Here’s an example: What if you are a mustached divorcee who is a former smoker with six kids. Gross, right? I would never go out with a man of that description. But if I met Brad Pitt in person, I’d probably rip my clothes off and tell him to park his pink rocket ship in my garage of love immediately.
The lesson of today’s sermon is: Enjoy the college life while you can. I have looked into the crystal ball that is my older cousins’ and siblings’ dating lives, and the future ain’t pretty. Or, at least, it didn’t seem pretty from its eHarmony profile pictures.
Ladies, if you are really serious about finding love, an Irish accent turns you on, and the thought of moving does not terrify you, buy a ticket to Lisdoonvarna.
SARAH IN THE CITY: Luck of the Irish . . . ?
by Sarah Swain
I WOULDN’T normally trust a 65-year-old man with a Father Christmas beard to find me a date.
But I made an exception for Willie Daly.
I was in Lisdoonvarna, an Irish spa town with a special attraction - its annual matchmaking festival.
It’s a time for the single farmers of County Clare to attend to a much more pressing matter than milking - finding a wife.
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First set up to help farmers find love 150 years ago it still serves that purpose today - and a massive 40,000 people will arrive from all over the world during the five weeks of the festival which runs until October 5.
The local newspaper even reports a “Pamela Anderson lookalike” from Texas is in town looking for a hunky Irish husband - and she also happens to be an oil heiress.
As Lisdoonvarna’s official matchmaker, Willie knows what he’s talking about.
He’s matched hundreds of couples and claims to have a 90% success rate.
From a little booth in the corner of the Matchmaker Bar, Willie introduces people he thinks would be suitable for each other.
Men pay 20 euros to go on his books, while the cost for women is “negotiable”.
But could he help me?
“For you I would find a man with a strong build, daftish hair and blue eyes,” Willie told me.
“Not very tall, but strong. And a handsome man.”
And just half a glass of wine later, Willie beckoned me over to introduce me to someone.
“I’d like you to meet Sean.”
A small bloke with a cheeky smile got to his feet, swayed dangerously towards me like a Weeble Wobble.
His eyes lit up like the runway at Shannon airport when he saw me.
“Are you REALLY single?” he said in his lovely accent, not letting go of my hand for about 20 minutes.
But, after chatting with Sean, who had been enjoying plenty of the black stuff that night, I decided he was a little too young for me.
So I decided to take things into my own hands and look for a man in The Matchmaker myself.
But, you see, in Lisdoonvarna, the usual rules don’t apply.
It’s assumed everybody is there for one reason only - and there’s no time to lose.
An innocent trip to the toilet saw me get chatted up three times - but sadly they all looked like they’d parked their tractors at the door (as they probably had).
On another walk to the bar a dozen men looked up from their pints like meer cats, stretching their necks to make sure they didn’t miss a potential Mrs passing by.
Though, again, most of them looked like they’d just sailed in from Craggy Island.
But then I spied a stag night. I could tell they were a stag night as they’d all grown matching moustaches and were wearing cowboy hats in different animal prints.
And I wouldn’t usually approach a bunch of stags.
But I’m glad I did, as I was soon holding court with a hot lawyer from Dublin who looked a lot like American actor Adrien Brody.
His latest case, he told me, was between two rival hair growth drug companies - maybe that was the daftish hair Willie was on about.
He was a strong, silent type, taller than me - and he definitely did have blue eyes.
And I was thrilled when he let me gaze into them.
I might not have found a match for life but, to be sure, it was a great night…
# Thanks to http://www.tourismireland.com, http://www.fernhillfarm.net and http://www.matchmakerireland.com.
Publication date 19/09/08
Where does your city place as the best for singles?
The Best Cities For Singles
Michael Noer
For the first time ever, Atlanta tops our list of the best cities for singles. The capital of Georgia and home of Coca-Cola earns the top slot because of its hopping nightlife, relatively high number of singles and sizzling job growth.
To those who know “Hotlanta,” the ranking should come as no surprise. In the eight years that we have been ranking America’s largest urban areas in terms of their friendliness to the nation’s 74 million single adults, only once did Atlanta place outside the top 10.
To determine which U.S. cities are most comfortable for soloists, we ranked the 40 largest urbanized areas in mainland America in seven different categories: number of singles, nightlife, culture, cost of living alone, job growth, online dating activity and coolness. To determine a city’s cool factor, we partnered with Harris Interactive (nasdaq: HPOL - news - people ), who conducted a poll, asking, “Among the following U.S. Cities, which one do you think is the coolest?” (Click here for the complete methodology.)
Complete List: The Best Cities For Singles
Last year’s winner, San Francisco, came in second this year, scoring particularly high in coolness (third out of 40) and culture (fourth). Overall, the coolest city was New York, while Midwestern fly-over cities like Indianapolis (40th) and Columbus, Ohio, (35th) did poorly on the Harris poll.
Overall, New York ranked as only the eighth-best place for would-be lovers. In addition to its top score in coolness, the Big Apple was ranked as the city with the best nightlife and the third-best cultural resources. But young singles need to eat as well as party, and New York scored dead last in the cost-of-living category. The city also placed a mediocre 29th in terms of job growth. Economic factors have always kept New York out of the top spot on our list.
The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, came in 16th this year, a precipitous drop from its third-place finish in 2007. Blame the cost of living in sun-drenched SoCal and a lackadaisical online dating culture.
Jacksonville, Fla., ranked dead last this year, scoring poorly in all categories except online dating, where it ranked seventh. Providence, R.I., last year’s loneliest city for singletons, fared better, tying with Memphis, Tenn., and Cincinnati, Ohio, for 33rd place. Religious Salt Lake City, a perennial at the bottom of our list, comes in 39th this year. Mormonism’s hometown is penalized for its lack of available singles (39th), dismal nightlife (39th) and its square image (coolness: 38th).
By The Numbers: The Best Cities For Singles
Some surprises: Orlando, Fla., which had never placed in the top 10 before, came in ninth place. Minneapolis-St. Paul hadn’t made the top 10 since 2002 but came in third this year. The Twin Cities scored well in culture (ninth) and online dating (sixth) and ranked surprisingly high in coolness (eighth). Perhaps some respondents thought the Harris poll was asking about the weather.
Our rankings are meant to be a guide for young, ambitious singles who, in an age of techno-mobility, can live and work wherever they want. Our methodology focuses on career-minded, “never-marrieds” under the age of 35. Older singles, divorcees, widows and widowers might find slightly different criteria more relevant to them.
The Best Cities For Singles
1. Atlanta
2. San Francisco
3. Dallas
3. Minneapolis
5. Washington D.C.
6. Seattle
7. Boston
8. New York City
9. Orlando
10. Phoenix
11. Chicago
11. Denver-Aurora
13. Miami
14. Austin
15. San Antonio
16. Los Angeles
17. Houston
18. Charlotte
19. San Diego
20. St. Louis
21. Columbus
22. Philadelphia
23. Tampa-St. Petersburg
24. Las Vegas
25. Baltimore
26. Virginia Beach-Norfolk
27. Detroit
28. Pittsburgh
29. Portland
30. Buffalo
30. Milwaukee
32. Sacramento
33. Cincinnati
33. Memphis
33. Providence
36. Kansas City
37. Indianapolis
38. Cleveland
39. Salt Lake City
40. Jacksonville
Okay, this is a very long reprint, and I apologize in advance, but I thought that this article which appeared in a recent “Atlantic” was too good not to put here in it’s entirety. A dilemma that I hear all to often is from women who fret about “settling,” staying with the less-than-perfect guy rather than continuing their search for the ideal. Here’s a long and thoughtful piece from the other side. Author Lori Gottlieb went ahead and had her baby, since Mr. Perfect had not shown up. Here what she is thinking now:
The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough
by Lori Gottlieb
Marry Him!
About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.
“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.
Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.
Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there’s supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn’t feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it’s unlikely.
And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)
When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.
What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.
I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.
The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?
It’s not that I’ve become jaded to the point that I don’t believe in, or even crave, romantic connection. It’s that my understanding of it has changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long- married couples are having much sex anyway?
“I just want someone who’s willing to be in the trenches with me,” my single friend Jennifer told me, “and I never thought of marriage that way before.” Two of Jennifer’s friends married men who Jennifer believes aren’t even straight, and while Jennifer wouldn’t have made that choice a few years back, she wonders whether she might be capable of it in the future. “Maybe they understood something that I didn’t,” she said.
What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5’4” and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail:
I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).
She wasn’t joking.
A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.
All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where’s the cutoff? Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?
Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of major depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists.” He’d never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome, and smart. As I looked at him from across the table, I thought, Yeah, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that. But my very next thought was, Maybe I can settle for better. It’s like musical chairs—when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?
Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, I did, although I never articulated this, have certain requirements. I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.
Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me. What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. But when I chose to have a baby on my own, the plan was that I would continue to search for true connection afterward; it certainly wasn’t that I would have a baby alone only to settle later. After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?
Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.
I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something objectionable about making the case for settling, because it’s based on the premise that women’s biological clocks place them at the mercy of men, and that therefore a power dynamic dictates what should be an affair solely of the heart (not the heart and the ovaries). But I’m not the only woman who accepts settling as a valid choice—apparently so do the millions who buy bestselling relationship books that advocate settling but that, so as not to offend, simply spin the concept as a form of female empowerment.
Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)
The approaches in these books may differ, but the message is the same: more important than love is marriage. To achieve that goal, women across the country are poring over guidebooks that all boil down to determining, “Does he like me?,” while completely overlooking the equally essential question, “Do I like him?” In other words, whatever compromises you have to make—including, but not limited to, pretending to be or actually becoming an entirely different person—make sure that you get some schmo to propose to you before you turn into a spinster.
Last year’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women makes the most blatant case for settling: if women were more willing to “think outside the box,” as one of the book’s married sources advises, many of them would be married. The author then trots out tales of professional, accomplished women happily dating a plumber, a park ranger, and an Army helicopter nurse. The moral is supposed to be “Don’t be too picky” but many of the anecdotes quote women who seem to be trying to convince not just the reader, but themselves, that they haven’t settled.
“I should be with some guy with a vast vocabulary who is very smart,” said Heather, a 30-year-old lawyer turned journalist. Instead, she’s dating an actor who didn’t finish college. “My boyfriend is fun, he’s smart, but he hasn’t gone through years of school. He wanted to pursue acting. And you can tell—he doesn’t have that background, and it never ever once bothered me. But for everyone else, [his lack of education] is what they see.” Another woman says she dates “the ‘secrets’ … guys other women don’t recognize as great.” How’s that for damning praise?
Meanwhile, in sugarcoating this message, the authors often resort to flattery, telling the reader to remember how fabulous, attractive, charming, and intelligent she is, in the hopes that she’ll project a more confident vibe on dates. In my case, though, the flattery backfired. I read these books thinking, Wait, if I’m such a great catch, why should I settle for anyone less than my equal? If I’m so fabulous, don’t I deserve true romantic connection?
Only one popular book that I can think of in the vast “find a man” genre (like most single women confounded by their singleness, I’m embarrassingly well versed) takes the opposite approach. In He’s Just Not That Into You, written by the happily married Greg Behrendt and the unhappily single Liz Tuccillo, the duo exhorts women not to settle. But the book’s format is telling: Behrendt gives perky pep talks to women unable to find a worthy match, while Tuccillo repeatedly comments on how hard it is to take her co-author’s advice, because while being with a partner who is “beneath you” (Behrendt’s term) is problematic, being single just plain “sucks” (Tuccillo’s term).
Before I got pregnant, though, I also read single-mom books such as Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide, whose chapter titles “Can I Afford It?” and “Dealing With the Stress” seemed like realistic antidotes to the faux-empowering man-hunting manual headings like “A Little Lingerie Can Go a Long Way.” But the book’s author, Mikki Morrissette, held out a tantalizing carrot. In her introduction, she describes having a daughter on her own; then, she writes, a few years later and five months pregnant with her son, “I met a guy I fell in love with. He and my daughter were in the delivery room when my son was born in January 2004.” Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all—a baby now, my soul mate later!”
Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.
Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man—much less The One—is going to knock on your door and join that party.
They also gloss over the cost of dating as a single mom: the time and money spent on online dating (because there are no single men at toddler birthday parties); the babysitter tab for all those boring blind dates; and, most frustrating, hours spent away from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”
Try bringing a guy home to that.
Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.
My friend Alan, for instance, justified his choice of a “bland” wife who’s a good mom but with whom he shares little connection this way: “I think one-stop shopping is overrated. I get passion at my office with my work, or with my friends that I sometimes call or chat with—it’s not the same, and, boy, it would be exciting to have it with my spouse. But I spend more time with people at my office than I do with my spouse.”
Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.
“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”
Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be the true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it,” there’s none of the ambivalence a woman with a deadline feels. “Women are the least romantic,” Gabe said. “They think, ‘I can do that.’ For a lot of women, it becomes less about love and more about what they can live with.”
Not long ago, Gabe, who is 43, dated a woman he liked very much one-on-one, but he broke up with her because “she couldn’t be haimish”—comfortable—with his friends in a group setting. He has no regrets. A female friend who broke up with a guy because he “didn’t like to read” and who is now, too, a single mom (with, ironically, no time to read herself) similarly felt no regrets—at first. At the time, she couldn’t imagine settling, but here’s the Catch-22: “If I’d settled at 39,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”
The paradox, of course, is that the more it behooves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to settle; a woman in her mid- to late 30s is more discriminating than one in her 20s. She has friends who have known her since childhood, friends who will know her more intimately and understand her more viscerally than any man she meets in midlife. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move downtown, but I love my home at the beach,” and, “But he’s just not curious,” and “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”
I’ve been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it’s the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we’d choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever.That’s not a whole lot of choice.
Remember the movie Broadcast News? Holly Hunter’s dilemma—the choice between passion and friendship—is exactly the one many women over 30 are faced with. In the end, Holly Hunter’s character decides to wait for the right guy, but he (of course) never materializes. Meanwhile, her emotional soul mate, the Albert Brooks character, gets married (of course) and has children.
And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.
My friend Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s like, ‘God, that would be nice.’”
That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing Internet poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching ESPN and calls that “a massage.” The more-pertinent questions, to most concerned mothers of daughters in their 30s, have to do with whether the daughter’s boyfriend will make a good father; or, if he’s a workaholic, whether he can provide the environment for her to be a good mother. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician, “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”
I know all this now, and yet—here’s the problem—much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. It’s not that I have to be dazzled by a guy anymore (though it would be nice). It’s not even that I have to think about him when he’s not around (though that would be nice, too). Nor is it that I’m unable to accept reality and make significant compromises because that’s what grown-ups do (I can and have—I had a baby on my own).
No, the problem is that the very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. It’s no longer a matter, as it was in my early 30s, of “just not feeling it,” of wanting to be in love. Consider the men whom older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; a trying-to-make-it-in-his-40s actor; a widower who has three nightmarish kids and who’s still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer (so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party). It’s not that these women are crazy; it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when we were younger. And while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, now I have my son to consider. It’s one thing to settle for a subpar mate; it’s quite another to settle for a subpar father figure for my child. So while there’s more incentive to settle now, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.
This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods. Admittedly, it’s a dicey case to make because, like the divorced women I know who claim they wouldn’t have done anything differently, because then they wouldn’t have Biff and Buffy, I, too, can’t imagine life without my magical son. (Although, had I had children with a Mr. Good Enough, wouldn’t I be as hopelessly in love with those children, too?) I also acknowledge the power of the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon, and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.
But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”
The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”
Not one person has taken me up on this offer.
Just about anything you want can be found on the net, even love, right? Here’s a resource for singles with a yen to find both love and adventure:
Travel Briefs
Travel dating pairs couples on the road
Single and like meeting people on vacation and business trips? Or simply want to put the downtime spent in the airplane, on layovers and between business meetings to better use? Matchmaking travel agencies can help you connect with like-minded singles who share your flight or itinerary.
TripLife, at http://www.triplife.com, lets you create a personal profile including photo, occupation, favorite sport, alma mater or any appropriate information, enter your travel plans, then instantly see profiles of other people on your flight or already at your destination. You can e-mail invites to prospective golfing partners or dinner companions and remain in the network for later notification whenever you and other TripLife members are in the same city.
Then there’s speed dating aboard a 737. SkyDate, http://www.skydate.eu/v1.0/eu/home/home.php, offers travelers to Europe this opportunity to enjoy brief encounters with several people on an airline flight. Women remain seated, and men make the rounds. Participants are discouraged from asking each other out and instead rate their speed dates by vote. Those who voted to meet each other again are then given contact information.
Other travel dating services include O Solo Mio, http://www.osolomio.com; and MatchTravel, http://www.matchtravel.com.
The 1/13/2008 NYT article that I wrote about in the last blog posting included a list of questions that came out of the meeting of the First Wives’ Club. I thought they were so interesting that I’ve posted the questions below. What are some of the questions you have had when you realized your marriage or relationship was really over?
January 13, 2008
What to Ask When It’s Over
The questions that arise after a divorce can be every bit as tough as those that precede the decision to part. The following were drawn from conversations among the women who attended the First Wives World meeting on Jan. 2, and from postings on the group’s Web site:
1. Am I emotionally strong enough to move on? If not, how do I become stronger?
2. What are you looking for, now that you’re single again?
3. My spouse cheated on me, so why do I feel like a failure because my marriage didn’t work?
4. Before dating again, shouldn’t I first try to get comfortable with being alone?
5. Will I stay in touch with my ex’s friends and family?
6. If children are involved, how do I cope when they are under another roof?
7. How soon will I start dating again? If there are children, how will I explain it to them?
8. In terms of my ex, is it ever a good idea to get physically or emotionally involved again?
9. What is the one thing I want to do now that I would have never done when I was married?
10. In addition to lines like “Forget about him” and “Move on with your life,” what divorce clichés are you most tired of hearing?
If you’d like a subtle way to meet and get to know other singles over an extended period of time while traveling to interesting places AND affordably, check out Contiki. Read this article by Sheila Flynn which describes the experience of a Contiki tour. While not specifically billed as a singles’ tour (those in relationships can also sign up and travel), singles can identify themselves as available for dates with a red or green light designation. Romances can bloom while all are traveling in the company of like-minded others (well, travel-lovers, anyway). And I would think that the arrangement would be both safe for otherwise solo travelers, and potentially more fun with soon-to-be friends.
The tour options are world-wide, and better-known in Europe. But how about expanding to older age groups? Lots of us are over 35, ya know.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
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