Category Archives: Relationships
What To Expect When Dating An Older Man – YourTango
A big age difference can be a big deal.
This summer, I, at the tender age of 21, fell in love with a 37-year-old.
He, for his part, disputes this claim, and in the unlikely event that he ever reads this, would probably prefer I stick to terms like “dated” or “developed a crush on,” but more on that later.
In case you missed it, big age gaps are having a major cultural moment right now.
From the infamous yet surprisingly long-lived Scott Disick/Sofia Richie romance to Drake’s newfound habit of hanging out with teenagers, May-December romances are raising eyebrows all over Hollywood right now. But what do these relationships look like when you’re not a celebrity?
When my last relationship ended, older friends and family members all said the same thing about my 22-year-old ex: “He’s so young. Guys that age just don’t know what they want yet.”
This was annoying advice, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. People have held men to lower maturity standards for as long as I can remember. I’ve been told that “girls mature faster than boys” since elementary school. Naturally, this is a problematic stereotype on multiple levels, from its reinforcement of a gender binary to its biological essentialism and casual refusal to hold men responsible for their behavior.
Then again, my own experience has seldom contradicted this nugget of conventional wisdom, so I figured hey, might as well give it a shot with a man who’s had a little more time to pickle. I adjusted my Tinder age range, capping it at 38 instead of 28, and decided to see what happened.
I met up with a few so-so men in their mid-thirties, but it didn’t take me long to connect with Ray, the 37-year-old I ended up spending the summer with.
Here are 7 things that happen when you date an older man — or at least 7 things that happened when I dated one.
1. You get to go on better dates.
Or, rather, you get to go on dates, period. I don’t know if it’s because cusp Gen X/Millennials came of age in a pre-Tinder, pre-Netflix-and-chill era, or if we can maybe all hope to one day grow into the wining and dining lifestyle, but dating an older guy was definitely an upgrade in that dating him actually involved, well, dates. Go figure.
When he held doors open for me at Upper West Side restaurants and held my hand as I stumbled out of West Village bars, my dating life suddenly felt much more Carrie Bradshaw and much less college.
Moreover, there were none of the annoying bad dating habits that modern technology seems to have bred in the younger generation. There was no vaguely suggesting we hang out then just never texting me on the day of the tentative plans, no “U up?” texts at 2 a.m., no pointless back and forth about where we should go for dinner. He made plans and he stuck to them. It was mind blowing.
On our first date, he texted to confirm and got there early to get us a spot. When I walked into the bar, he had already ordered a cheese plate for us. It was the most competent thing I had ever witnessed a man do — a realization that led to some serious consideration of just how low I had set the bar for men and to what extent I can blame it on society.
2. You text less.
For as long as I’ve been dating, texting has been the religion of any relationship. How often you text is the barometer for your relationship status and any decrease in frequency, shift in emoji use, or perceived change in tone has always been immediate cause for panic.
When I was seeing Ray, however, texting was never a big deal. We texted back and forth a few times a week to make plans or sometimes to chat about something specific, but our relationship wasn’t defined by a fixed schedule beginning and ending with obligatory good morning and goodnight texts.
For someone who once used to earnestly believe having someone to constantly text was the main point of a relationship, this was initially a strange, daunting concept. And yet, I was surprisingly fine with it.
Turns out your life — and your relationship/situationship/casual but secretly not-so-casual fling — is a lot less stressful when you aren’t constantly waiting for a text and then obsessively mining each one for hidden subtext that he doesn’t like you anymore.
3. You try to use him for networking purposes.
Ray turned out to be an inarguably good-looking guy, but admittedly, the collection of mostly blurry, mostly distant group shots on his Tinder profile wasn’t what got him a first date. Rather, it was the brief Internet stalk that revealed his job. I was actually explicitly forbidden from ever mentioning his real name, position, or place of work in an article pretty early on, but let’s just say the name of the company he worked for is enough to wet the panties of any unpaid editorial intern in New York. Tinder is the new LinkedIn, ladies.
On our first date, I politely pretended to ask where he worked, but I copped to my Internet stalk a few drinks in and joked, but actually not-joked, that he should get me a job. You know, flirting.
To this day, I even have an unsent text drafted in my iPhone notes to the effect of “Heyyy so I know last time we saw each other I told you I loved you then cried myself to sleep in your bed, but is there any chance you’d be willing to pass my resume along to anyone in HR?”
4. Nothing, really.
By and large, I was mostly just surprised by how normal everything felt. Ray and I clicked pretty immediately. We had plenty to talk about and lots in common. In fact, while I’ve often struggled to make conversation with men my own age, Ray and I were seldom at a loss for words. More often than not, we found ourselves cutting each other off because everything one of us said triggered a new thought in the other one’s head.
From time to time, a friend would inevitably ask me, “But isn’t it weird?” And, the answer, truthfully, was no.
All things considered, dating Ray felt pretty effortless — considerably more so than most romantic interactions I’ve had with men my own age.
5. His bathroom is cleaner than yours.
When you’re a straight woman dating straight men in their early to mid-twenties, you’re almost guaranteed to be the clean one in the relationship. This has its pros and cons. Sure, you have to hang out with some dude in his pigsty of an apartment, but you also get the satisfaction of knowing you’re the one that has their life together while putting in relatively little effort to maintain that image.
When you’re a college student dating an actual man with an actual apartment, however, the tables turn. We spent most of that summer at his place, a pristine Upper West Side apartment that I routinely littered with shed hair and lost earrings. The one time he ever came to my place — a.k.a., my dorm room — I scrubbed the place down for an hour and still couldn’t match his level of cleanliness.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “’girl bathrooms are always messy.”
6. He infantilizes you.
Something I have yet to mention about my summer romance is that from the beginning, it could never have been anything more. I was an intern living in New York for the summer, and, though we rarely mentioned it, we both knew I’d be leaving in August.
We both knew our romance had come with a built-in expiration date, but that didn’t stop me from trying to thwart it when the time came. On our last night together, I went for broke. I told him I had fallen in love with him and I wanted to see him again. While I was prepared for rejection, I was not prepared for him to try to talk me out of it.
“We don’t know each other well enough to be in love,” he dutifully informed me. He told me that love wasn’t what I thought it was. He brought out the old “I know you may think you feel a certain way,” and “You’re so young, you don’t even know who you’re going to be three years from now, six years from now.” He even dropped the, “You’ll forget about me in a month.”
All summer, our age gap had been more or less negligible. But as soon as real emotions came into play, I suddenly turned into a girl with a crush who couldn’t even be trusted to properly identify her own feelings.
7. You infantilize yourself.
Naturally, I wanted to be angry at him. But the truth was, as much as I pretended not to notice our age difference, I definitely got a certain thrill from it.
Dating someone significantly older than me inevitably heightened my awareness of my own youth and its power. The reality is, we live in a youth-obsessed culture and those standards are particularly high for women. At 21, I am already sharply aware that my own youth, and the power and privilege that comes with it, is on the verge of beginning its steady decline.
We often accuse men dating younger women of trying to relive their youth, but maybe the younger women in question have some stake in the matter as well. Dating someone older exaggerated my youth, making me feel like I could preserve or extend it a little longer.
On our first date, I remember strolling out of the bar hand in hand, drunkenly admitting that “I date older men because I know that someday when I am 37, my 37-year-old husband is going to want to date 21-year-olds.”
From day one, there was definitely a part of me that clung to the illusion of eternal youth the age gap provided — probably the same part of me that’s currently sleeping with a 48-year-old.
Kayla Kibbe is a writer wrapping up her final semester at Connecticut College where she is an English major with a concentration in creative writing. She covers trending celebrity and entertainment news, love and relationships, and astrology.
Dear Abby: Sparks fail to fly for mom dating her 'perfect match' – CT Post
-
A woman is unable to spark her feelings for a man she is dating.
A woman is unable to spark her feelings for a man she is dating.
Photo: Juanmonino/Getty Images
A woman is unable to spark her feelings for a man she is dating.
A woman is unable to spark her feelings for a man she is dating.
Photo: Juanmonino/Getty Images
Dear Abby: I have a close friend who is in her mid-30s. She’s a wonderful, divorced, hardworking Christian mother of four who has finally ventured back to the dating scene. She’s currently seeing a guy who in all respects is perfect for her, she says. Unfortunately, when it comes to romance, for some reason she can’t seem to get aroused, and it’s now at a point where she avoids his kiss if possible. She really likes him and would love for this to work, but she feels conflicted because she doesn’t know how to “light her fire” and find him intimately attractive. She’s afraid she’ll eventually push him away even though she wants the exact opposite. Any advice I can pass along?
Needing a Friend in the Southwest
Dear Needing: Your friend needs to understand why she’s having a problem “getting her fire lit.” Could it be related to her divorce? Her feelings about premarital intimacy? Has she seen her doctor to rule out a physical cause? Or could it be that although he looks good on paper, there’s simply no chemistry? Because intimacy is an important part of marriage, she needs to be honest with herself about why she’s reacting the way she is. If this isn’t the only man this has happened with, and she can’t find the answers within herself, some sessions with a licensed mental health professional may be in order.
Dear Abby: My husband invited his good friend (an artist) to stay with us for two nights because he is coming to our city to give a speech. He accepted. We tried to contact him two weeks ago, one week ago, three days ago, yesterday and this morning to find out what time he’ll arrive so we can plan our schedule and prepare the food. He still hasn’t gotten back to us. I had planned to go to church and a concert afterward. My husband doesn’t want me to leave. I am very frustrated about the man’s lack of consideration. My husband considers him a good friend, but after the way we are being treated, I’m not convinced.
Still Waiting in California
Dear Still Waiting: I don’t blame you for being miffed. Good friends don’t treat each other so rudely. They answer their messages and show up when they’re expected. Unless the man was in the hospital, solitary confinement or dead, there’s no excuse for his poor manners. Because your husband considers him a good friend, he should have stayed home to welcome “the artist” and let you off the hook.
Dear Abby: My son and daughter-in-law are “horrified” that we refer to our 3-year-old grandson’s penis using the correct terminology. Should we relent and refer to that part of his body as something else?
Unsure in the South
Dear Unsure: Not in my opinion. Children should be taught the correct terms for their body parts as soon as they are aware enough to identify — and pronounce — them. To do this will prevent confusion and possibly embarrassment later.
Let's Just Pause to Appreciate the Greatest Ever Quote About Trump's Conduct on the Tweet Machine – Esquire.com
Getty ImagesChip Somodevilla
At this charming juncture in our national history, a news cycle lasts approximately two hours and 45 minutes. You’ve got that long to process that the Secretary of Defense is resigning—essentially in protest—before you learn that the president just started ranting to a group of Boy Scouts about who really killed JonBenet Ramsey, or whatever. But in the spirit of the holiday season, and of slow-sipping a Macallan by the fire, we have decided to resist the swirling tempests of Our National Dialogue and highlight something from the past. For this, we’re time-traveling all the way back…to yesterday.
On Thursday, Politico published a delightful story tracing how Donald Trump, American president, got control of his own Tweet Machine. You see, up until 2013, he had a social media manager named Justin McConney who would actually type and send each bit of, say, dating advice to Robert Pattinson. The workflow for this was legitimately bonkers.
Even as the mogul embraced digital media, he did so in the most analog way possible. He had McConney print out his Twitter mentions, and he would use Sharpie pens to scribble responses, which McConney would then type up and tweet out. After appearing at events, Trump, who remained distrustful of anything he saw only on a screen, had McConney print out 8×10 glossy photos of him for his signoff before they were posted online.
But one day, Trump got hold of the controls himself. In vintage fashion, he first used them to praise someone for praising him on the teevee:
This prompted perhaps the greatest ever quote about Trumpian social media use. Certainly it’s the best from this news cycle.
“The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself was comparable to the moment in ‘Jurassic Park’ when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors,” recalled McConney, who was the Trump Organization’s director of social media from 2011 to 2017. “I was like, ‘Oh no.'”
This is a thing of beauty. Think of all the angst and anxiety and fear and hilarity and outrage and hate and generalized insanity that has cascaded down from that moment. That relatively minor spasm of narcissism directed at actress Sherri Shepherd was the Smocking Gun heard ’round the world.
The entire profession of journalism has spent three years obsessed with the tweets, and how to cover the tweets, or whether to cover the tweets, or which tweets to cover. The entire Republican congressional caucus lies in paralyzing fear of the tweets and the prospect of personal attacks or debilitating political own goals. American allies must continually wonder whether King Lear will declare some new war via tweet, or dissolve their treaty in an early-morning episode while posted on the golden commode. The president has been chasing the American republic around the kitchen for almost two years now.
Every day, of course, is a Trump Tweet Day. But this morning, a day after we learned of The Velociraptor Theory, seems like a particularly potent case-in-point. The president, you see, is going hog wild. More than ever, he seems like an arsonist with a firehose of gasoline and a matchbox the size of a football field. His SecDef, one of the supposed Adults In The Room, is high-tailing it out of the Pentagon. El Jefe and pretty much every organization he’s ever run are now the subject of 17 separate investigations, even after he agreed to shut down his Foundation on the basis it served no purpose except to assist in his grifts and pump helium into his sad ego.
He has pronounced himself committed to shutting down the government over funding for The Big, Beautiful Wall. Except now, of course, having fully shouldered the blame for any shutdown last week in a bit of true political genius, he is now blaming the Democrats.
In the process, he showcased how much of this is an attempt to remedy the crushing psychic blow dealt to him by Nancy Pelosi in that WWE showdown meeting last week:
He’s also tweeting at the Senate Majority Leader (“Mitch”) to try to get him to blow up the filibuster in order to get this one bill through with 51 votes—a move many expect Democrats would love, with an eye on the moment if and when they retake power in the chamber.
But none of this production would be complete without a bare-faced, easily debunked lie. In true Trumpian fashion, the president seems to have magicked a series of past events into existence out of thin air. The president is Saying Things again, folks.
It will shock you to learn Ronald Reagan did not actually advocate for The Wall. In fact, he said something approaching the opposite:
Why should that matter, though? Trump knows his people like Reagan, so Reagan liked whatever Trump wants to do now. Capiche? Also, notice that after years railing against fences and making it explicitly clear he will only build a Big, Beautiful Wall—30 feet high and made of concrete—the president now finds a fence and a wall interchangeable. It’s almost like he’s completely full of shit and doesn’t care.
Republicans May Cancel 2020 Primary for Trump
I Hope That Tax Cut Was Worth It
Trump Just Made the United States a Laughingstock
At this point, it’s hard to register much shock. According to the Washington Post, the president has made 7,546 false claims in 700 days. That’s 10.78 per day. On one day in the run-up to the midterm election, when he was in full-on Caravan propaganda mode, Trump unleashed 139 goddamn lies in one day. The man is relentless. He does not believe in the concept of truth in the public discourse. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. And we’ve seen, over the last three years, that the Tweet Machine is a great place to get people to believe things.
Awkward Family Christmas: 5 tips to survive small talk with relatives – WABC-TV
NEW YORK (WABC) —
The winter holidays are approaching and with them come copious amounts of family time… Lots of family time.
While spending time with family can reaffirm the bonds of love and togetherness, it can also be a minefield of dangerous conversation topics.
After the light “how are you’s” and the “how’s work” comes the real conversations that most people want to avoid:
POLITICS
DATING
FINANCES
and MORE!
I sat down with Teresa Grella-Hillebrand, the Director of the Counseling and Mental Health Professions Clinic at Hofstra University, and Teresa has seen it all!
From family clashes to that weird uncle you get stuck talking to after too much wine to sibling rivalries.
Teresa broke down the top issues for this year’s holiday season and how to navigate them to have an enjoyable, memorable holiday break.
(Copyright ©2018 WABC-TV. All Rights Reserved.)
