Looking for Love (Or Not) at 50

For the last several years, I considered myself a reformed (or better yet, retired) lifetime dater. I’d like to take full credit for this brave and late-coming choice, but a complete surgical hysterectomy pretty much took the wind out of my social sails, at forty-five. After spending the better part of my life single, childless, and continually chasing my own version of the perfect romance, it was actually a bit of a relief. For the next few years, non-dating felt somewhat lonely and strange to me.

But by fifty, my interior life had settled down considerably, allowing me the opportunity to pursue a second college degree, take up a hobby I longed to pursue, and adapt the persona of a mature woman with a real life. Gone were all the awkward first-date insecurities and jealous confrontations of paranoid, new love. Gone, as well, was a lifetime legacy of dear John/dear me notes, delivered all too often as phone or email messages.

So, when the slightest urge to couple resurfaced in my long-hormonally-vacant heart, I first suspected my pharmacist of a serious estrogen switch-a-roo. All of the sudden, my social butterflies were hovering around me like a reverse romantic force-field. What fateful force could possibly induce my leap from the comfort of the celibacy wagon? In a word: Yet-another-dating-site.com. Overwhelmed with curiosity, and, dare I say it, hope, I perused the site for ten or fifteen minutes, then bit into the Internet love-bullet. For those of you whose hands sweat at the thought of taking such a drastic step in the name of new romance, I’ve returned from the cloud with some good news, and some bad news.

The good news is, nothing’s changed since high school. The bad news is, nothing’s changed since high school. In the romance-on-steroids pace of cyber space, dating site members expend their online energies in one of two major ways: The pursuit of ASAP sex, or the practice of serial flirtation. It’s as if the Internet has opened a portal to the generalized pubescence rampant in all of us at age seventeen. My first invitation to participate in an instant messaging chat arrived as soon as I posted my new profile and least-damaging photo. This might not be so bad after all, I thought. What began as a friendly conversation with a nice-looking, fiftyish IT guy, rapidly deteriorated into a fly-swatting fest with what turned out to be a disgusting, online porn talker.